Here is a video of Charles Leadbeater on TED, about Pro-Ams (“innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards”) and Open Innovation.

The theme of the video is closely related to this book (that I found very useful while developing my thesis): “The Pro-Am Revolution. How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society written by Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller in 2004, available under a Creative Commons license from Demos.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We’re witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Acknowledging the importance of Pro-Ams is one of the first steps towards acknowledging the social and distributed nature of creativity, and therefore of collective intelligence and then its application in Open Innovation cases.