Do it yourself innovation

Forbes is running a special feature on do-it-yourself inventors - Inventing The Future:

Most of the big commercial technology companies do all they can to hide the complexity of their products under shiny, tamper-proof surfaces. But there's a subversive movement building too, led by self-proclaimed do-it-yourselfers. They want to reinvent the gadgets in their life, much like software hackers have reworked code.

As one of the stories (Grass-Roots Innovation Takes Root) points out, this is a major part of the innovation system:

We can't get along without hackers and makers. Oil refining, woodworking, sewing machines, guns, scientific instruments and sporting goods have all been fundamentally changed by innovations from users, not producers. These "lead users," as MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls them, have had an outsized influence on the past and will continue to dictate the shape of things to come.

So, where is the National Innovation Policy that recognizes the DIY innovation system? Instead we seem to still have a policy that is built around the old producer-driven, linear model that all innovation comes out of the laboratory (in universities, government labs or corporate labs).