Despite the extensive literature on the benefits of netnography and crowdsourcing for insight and idea generation, little research has been conducted on their practical relevance and application for identifying lead users. We address this gap through an analysis of 24 lead user projects investigating the viability, underlying processes, and main differences of these new search strategies. We argue that both methods justify the significant investments by additionally providing a user-centric basis for subsequent ideation sessions with lead users. Our findings contribute to user innovation literature by demonstrating new ways of identifying these highly valuable users in the social media age.
Unternehmen sehen sich in ihrer Innovationstätigkeit mit zahlreichen Einflussfaktoren aus ihrem Umfeld konfrontiert. Rechtliche Faktoren spielen dabei zunehmend eine entscheidende Rolle und geben Impulse für neue Produkte und Dienstleistungen. Eine Studie in vier Unternehmen unterstreicht die Bedeutung rechtlicher Impulse für das Innovationsmanagement, zeigt deren Wirkweise auf und liefert mögliche Ansätze zur systematischen Nutzung dieses Potenzials.
Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for a strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times, companies are trying to alleviate the risk of lacking user-acceptance through opening their innovation processes to external actors, particularly customers. The method of integrating lead users is determined by the effective and systematic identification of leading-edge customers, which is considered to be a critical phase within this approach. With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, there is a huge potential to improve these selection processes. Our research into online communities and weblogs scrutinised the search criteria in an online environment and revealed the following characteristics as crucial factors for the online identification of lead users: being ahead of a market trend, high expected benefits, user expertise and motivation, extreme user needs as well as opinion leadership and an online commitment.
Crowdfunding has become a key research trend in recent years providing a new form of acquiring funding for innovation projects from users prior to the realization of the product in a ‘market before the market’. In this paper, we link the concept of crowdfunding with the user innovation phenomenon and show how user innovators harness crowdfunding to complement their innovative behavior and obtain funding to build firms and produce products in a more professional way. Conducting three case studies ranging from low- to high-tech crowdfunding campaigns, we investigate how crowdfunding impacts constituent dimensions of user innovation theory such as user motivation, user role, user community, collaboration between users and user investments. In particular, we argue that crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) may give rise to a more widespread occurrence of user entrepreneurs, who found a firm to commercialize their product or service in a marketplace they have created for their own need. Hence, we show the development from traditional user innovation to crowdfunding-enabled user innovation, which democratizes not only the creation but also the more large-scale commercialization of new products and services.
Research on the lead user method has been conducted for more than thirty years and has shown that the method is more likely to generate breakthrough innovation than traditional market research tools. Based on a systematic literature review, this paper shows a detailed view on the broad variety of research on lead user characteristics, lead user processes, lead user identification and application, and success factors. The main challenge of the lead user method as identified in literature is the resource issue regarding time, manpower, and costs. Also, internal acceptance and the processing of the method have been spotted in literature, as well as the intellectual property protection issue. From the starting point of the initial lead user method process introduced by Lüthje and Herstatt (2004), results are integrated into a revisited view on the lead user method process. In addition, concrete suggestions for corporate realization options are given. The article closes with limitations and future research suggestions.
Corporate innovation management geared to long-term success calls for a strategy to grow innovations into a substantial competitive advantage. This, however, coincides with an enormous failure-rate at the market, especially in the field of breakthrough innovations. Hence, in recent times, companies are trying to alleviate the risk of lacking user-acceptance through opening their innovation processes to external actors, particularly customers. The method of integrating lead users is determined by the effective and systematic identification of leading-edge customers, which is considered to be a critical phase within this approach. With the arrival of Web 2.0 applications, there is a huge potential to improve these selection processes. Our research into online communities and weblogs scrutinised the search criteria in an online environment and revealed the following characteristics as crucial factors for the online identification of lead users: being ahead of a market trend, high expected benefits, user expertise and motivation, extreme user needs as well as opinion leadership and an online commitment.
For engineering managers working in global organisations, tariffs have become an unpredictable force shaping all aspects of project delivery, sourcing, and design. Once treated as an issue reserved for finance or executive teams, trade-related taxes now directly influence engineering decisions on a daily basis. The challenge is not just that tariffs are higher but that they are volatile, shifting with political agendas that are difficult to predict.