Policy, productivity, passion and piracy: drawing lines around innovation in a knowledge-based economy

This article addresses the notion of innovation as it is employed and deployed in the knowledge-based economy strategy within the United Kingdom, and considers the 'ways of being' with technologies that are both encouraged by and problematic for this particular vision. In the shifts from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy described within a range of UK government policy reports, the notion of innovation is of central importance. Innovation is held as central to economic and social prosperity and, closely bound up with this, identified in diverse aspects of economic and social life. Innovation will be addressed at the level of policy and personal engagements, and the interplay between the two. Specifically, innovation will be explored in this article in terms of the user. Drawing on examples of user-creativity or user-innovation, the article argues that the forms of innovation or 'new ways of being' emerging with media technologies such as DVDs and digital games can be radically and antithetically different to those encouraged within government policy reports. Piracy, as an offshoot of these personal passions and practices, is identified as revealing the limitations and priorities of knowledge-based economy policy on innovation. This tension is then highlighted to argue that innovation is instrumentally framed in government policy in ways that marginalise or channel personal and emerging engagements with media technologies