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The constant introduction of new products is of great importance for the long-term financial success of companies. Newly launched products in consumer goods and services markets show high failure rates, often reaching 50%. In order to reduce flop rates, companies can integrate innovative and knowledgeable customers, so called 'lead users', into the new product development process. However, the detection of such lead users is difficult, especially in consumer goods markets with very large customer bases. A new and potentially valuable approach for the identification of lead users are virtual stock markets, which have been proposed and applied for political and business forecasting, but not for expert identification yet. The goal of this paper is to analyze theoretically and empirically the feasibility of virtual stock markets for lead user identification. We find in our empirical study that virtual stock markets are an effective instrument to identify lead users in consumer goods markets. Using the proposed method, companies operating in these markets can identify lead users more easily and integrate them into new product development projects. Thus, they can improve the innovation processes and reduce new product flop rates.
Highly recognized case studies and the intuitive notion that a heroic champion is required to help innovations overcome the indifference or even resistance that they face in many organizations explain that there has been a positive bias among academics and managers toward the role of champions in innovation processes. A look into the previous empirical literature on champions reveals, however, that a rigorous empirical investigation into organizational factors causing the emergence of executive champions and their impact on innovation performance is lacking. In addition, previous empirical research on champions is plagued with methodological problems such as measurement issues and single informant bias. This study uses multiple informant data from 258 respondents from 43 firms to examine various hypotheses. The findings reveal that executive champions are likely to emerge in organizational cultures that are conducive to innovation and they are less likely to emerge in organizational cultures that are unfavorable for innovation. We further find a non-linear, inverted u-shaped relationship between the level of executive championing activity and innovation performance. We find, in contrast with the commonly held belief, that executive champions have a strong negative impact on innovation performance particularly in cultures that make it difficult to innovate. Among the tested moderators, only the implementation of incentives for executive champions based on innovation performance offsets the negative impact of these champions on innovation performance. The findings lead us to substantially rethink the commonly believed role champions play in innovation processes.