Technological versus use regimes

Abstract

A growing body of STS literature addresses the merits of user involvement, but there are many barriers to effectively organise it. Elucidating this user-producer paradox, Hyysalo (2009) reviews three frameworks: (i) “learning by doing/using/interacting”, (ii) “social learning in technological innovation”, and (iii) a micro level framework studying new health technology. This paper contributes to this literature by discussing a fourth framework, focusing on rules and routines that orient and coordinate the activities of actors with regard to innovations. When rules are shared in communities of practice, they constitute a regime. We distinguish between technological and use regimes and show how this distinction helps interpreting a case study of a patient organisation that is only marginally involved in a R&D consortium on celiac disease. We claim that this lack of interaction is a manifestation of the lack of alignment between the technological and use regimes. The technological regime provides R&D actors with rules to routinely acquire relevant information about users and markets.