All Hands on Tech

2A History of Citizen-Led Innovation

There are many antecedents and inspirations of the citizen development idea over the last century or so. We won’t go into detail about any of them, but we want you to know that the idea stands on the shoulders of previous ideas and movements. Citizen development is one of many approaches to improving business performance that have come before it, although we don’t think there is anything exactly like it. Culturally, however, it has much in common with a long-term trend toward empowerment and encouragement of innovation by amateurs, either alone or in collaboration with professionals.

Outsiders and Insiders in Business Improvement

The desire to improve how work is done may go back multiple centuries, but one of the first systematic approaches to this objective was created by Frederick Taylor around the turn of the 20th century. His work is relevant to citizen development primarily because he pioneered the study of workflows, which are critical to the effective use of citizen (and professional, for that matter) automation. Were Taylor alive today, he would no doubt advocate the idea of not automating a bad process. As we discuss in Chapter 5 on citizen automation, we agree with Taylor. The combination of process improvement and workflow automation is a powerful one to which Taylor didn’t have access.

But Taylor, like many types of business improvers, was not a citizen. Rather, he was a manager (at Midvale Iron Works, Bethlehem Steel, and ...