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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.