Democratization of Innovation

In his book Democratization of Innovation Eric Von Hippel finds that need based innovations are most often and best made by lead users. Recently I have pointed out in this blog various applications of mobile phones in developing countries. The question that comes to my mind is could these users in developing countries be considered lead users innovating new services that the mobile operators could later commercialize? Is the use of prepaid mobile phone credits as currency a precursor to developing financial applications for example?