There seems to be increasing academic interest in the process of collective invention

There seems to be increasing academic interest in the process of collective invention, a concept which has been largely facilitated by the communications revolution of the past ten years. Traditionally, technological change has been considered to be the preserve of individual inventors, whether they're true individuals or single corporations.
Now, however, consumers are increasingly developing their own products, adapting commercially-available technology for their real needs rather than accepting the designer's stated purpose. The entire patent system, which has supposedly driven innovation for so long, depends on the inventor saying what the design is for. But mountain biking, kitesurfing and text messaging are all examples of users creating their own products or applications.
This isn't new: just Google "the case of the Cornish Pumping Engine" to see what I mean. But it's certainly a renewed spirit, and something which manufacturers are failing to exploit. Consumers don't particularly want to develop their own products - it's just necessary in a world where the success of a company is often measured in how well it controls its market.
How many of your suppliers even run online forums where you can give feedback or make suggestions? Outside the software sector, I suspect almost none. If you can't get the product you want, it's easy to turn to an alternative supplier who might have gone down that path, but it'd have been better to have pointed your existing supplier in that direction some time before. Far too many manufacturers say they "listen to the market" and are "customer driven" when they're nothing of the sort. They just mean that before committing to production, they ask customers for a reaction to their latest design. Big deal. Why not allow R+D to interact with the customers from the start?