Lead users: a source of novel product concepts
Management Science
Lead user analyses for the development of new industrial products
Management Science
Determinants of User Innovation and Innovation Sharing in a Local Market
Management Science
Research on Innovation: A Review and Agenda for Marketing Science
Marketing Science
User involvement competence for radical innovation
Journal of Engineering and Technology Management
A framework for evaluating business lead users' virtual reality innovations in Second Life
Electronic Commerce Research
Consumer Empowerment Through Internet-Based Co-creation
Journal of Management Information Systems
International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
Information Systems Research
How Do Product Users Influence Corporate Invention?
Organization Science
The Core and Cosmopolitans: A Relational View of Innovation in User Communities
Organization Science
DUXU'13 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Design, User Experience, and Usability: web, mobile, and product design - Volume Part IV
Online idea contests: identifying factors for user retention
OCSC'13 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Online Communities and Social Computing
A systematic approach for new service concept generation: Application of agent-based simulation
Expert Systems with Applications: An International Journal
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Traditional idea generation techniques based on customer input usually collect information on new product needs from a random or typical set of customers. The "lead user process" takes a different approach. It collects information about both needs and solutions from users at the leading edges of the target market, as well as from users in other markets that face similar problems in a more extreme form. This paper reports on a natural experiment conducted within the 3M Company on the effect of the lead user (LU) idea-generation process relative to more traditional methods. 3M is known for its innovation capabilities-- and we find that the LU process appears to improve upon those capabilities. Annual sales of LU product ideas generated by the average LU project at 3M are conservatively projected to be $146 million after five years--more than eight times higher than forecast sales for the average contemporaneously conducted "traditional" project. Each funded LU project is projected to create a new major product line for a 3M division. As a direct result, divisions funding LU project ideas are projecting their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years.