Identify Lead Users by customer competence

Abstract

Enterprises should let Lead Users participate in new product development. But in practice, it's very difficult for enterprises to identify lead users from a large amount of common consumers. Since lead users have stronger competencies than common users, customer competence can be used as a dimension to measure lead users. Based on this, a model of identifying lead users by computing their competencies is built. By dividing customer competences into several indicators, a weighted competence value can be computed. The users with the highest competence value can be considered as lead users. This model can help enterprises identify lead users more easily in practice.