آموزش اقتصاد و یادگیری اجتماعی یادگیری

Failure to meet the preferences and needs of users has been consistently stressed as a major cause of unsuccessful R&D for over 30 years. Yet little seems to change. An important element in this “producer–user paradox” is a lack of frameworks able to inform empirical research and the work that people do when they bridge designing, implementing, using and managing new technology. “Learning economy” and “social learning in technological innovation” appear promising as such integrative frameworks not least due to their emphasis on learning between producers and users. The present paper examines the value in the way learning is treated in these frameworks for empirical research and for the practitioners, and to this aim contrasts these frameworks to findings from a line of studies on learning between producers and users of new health technologies.

Failure to meet the preferences and needs of users has been consistently reported as being a major reason for unsuccessful R&D, particularly in high technology and software. In the 1970s a series of studies, including project SAPPHO, compared successful and unsuccessful innovation projects with regard to a range of different characteristics. Understanding of user needs was found to be one of the very few factors that was statistically significant and consistent (Coombs et al., 1987, 93–119; Rothwell et al., 1974). In the 1980s 70% of UK and US large information systems were classified as functional failures, bringing only harm or marginal utility for their customers (Gibbs, 1994). In the mid-1990s product developers’ own estimates about the failure rate of software projects was an astonishing 84%, in which failure to meet user needs featured again as the most common reason at 12% (StandishGroup, 1995). The situation has not changed. More in-depth inquiries about the dynamics of particular R&D processes also portray a similar difficulty in dealing with use and user-related issues in design (e.g. Miettinen et al., 2003, Rohracher, 2005 and Williams et al., 2005).

Juxtaposing three approaches to learning between developers and users as constitutive of innovation makes evident the differences in what is represented through learning in them. In LE and DUI, learning stands foremost in opposition to neo-classical economics and assumptions of circular flow. It is used to emphasize the importance of a continuously changing amount and kind of information as well as the interdependencies and organization of economic actors in an innovation system (Lundvall, 1988 and Lundvall and Johnson, 1994). In SLTI, learning is deployed to underscore the importance of trials, experiments, interactions between actors, and carry-over between projects in socio-economic change (Sorensen, 1996 and Williams et al., 2005). In the Finnish studies, learning is used to grasp the dynamics of how developers and users interact and how this affects innovation processes (Hasu, 2001, Lehenkari, 2006 and Miettinen, 2002). These differences in the referent, interests and disciplinary audiences are significant. The sceptically minded might be tempted to conclude that these approaches could not be usefully compared or learn from each other.