AbstractThe involvement of users in publicly-funded collaborative IT research projects in the UK has been partially constrained by a tendency to equate the ‘user’ with the ‘consumer’. This distances the user from the research process and makes the research appear too ‘near market’ to win funding. A vertical chain of ‘users’ with different types of user at each stage of the chain is proposed here. A number of novel collaborative structures have been established under the IEATP to facilitate user involvement and minimise the possibility of commercial conflict arising from multiple-user and user-producer relationships.