1 Chapter 18 Consumers’ Participation in Market Co-Creation: How Gays Impact Marketing Strategies through Consumer Society Stefano Podestà Luca Massimiliano Visconti 18.1 Introducing Market Co-creation and Politics The bond between innovation and markets should be variously observed. Nonetheless, the topic has long been dominated by an almost univocal interpretative paradigm that enforces the leading role of companies in the strategic creation of markets. Far from contesting firms’ momentum in market innovation, we reclaim better understanding of the role that consumers, both individually and in their social aggregations, show in transforming markets and social arenas. From a theoretical perspective, we detect three main phases in addressing the role of consumers in market innovation: (i) the subject-object interpretative framework; (ii) the user-dominated paradigm of innovation; and (iii) the subject-subject logic. First, the traditional subject-object framework has long been in favour. In this perspective, though the company holds the main role in directing market innovation, customer’s importance is not neglected, but carried out in the form of ‘customer orientation’. As such, consumers constitute a key constraint to companies and remain the final link of the productive and transactional chain. Therefore, customers are basically framed as passive agents who lack subjective agency. The user-dominated paradigm of innovation represents the second stage and largely benefits from Eric Von Hippel’s work. In the course of his 30-year research on innovation, the author has questioned the subject-object view, suggesting a more participative role for customers in product and service design. Von Hippel has long argued that customers are not only the source of