Lead Users Research Articles

HOW COMPLAINING CUSTOMERS MAKE COMPANIES LISTEN AND INFLUENCE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

The analysis in this paper shows how complaining customers can make companies listen to them by spurring the mobilisation of various actors into a hybrid collective strong enough to influence companies’ product development. Customers as sources of innovation have been analysed previously in the literature, whereas the process of how complaining users mobilise support to influence companies has received less attention and is not well understood.This study uncovers the processes that made it possible for a 17-year-old Norwegian to become pivotal in constructing a problematisation, which emerged to become so strong as to alter the Norwegian Coca-Cola Company’s earlier decision to cease production of a product in a certain size. The analysis uses constructs from actor–network theory (ANT) and shows how a single dissatisfied individual was able to become a spokesperson who, through different processes, mobilised a heterogeneous group of consumers into a loosely connected hybrid collective. The spokesperson acted on behalf of the hybrid collective and put growing pressure on a multinational company, influencing its decision making. In this case, the complaining customer did not exit, nor did he become a lead user, but rather became a hybrid customer who actively tried to mobile others in his desire for a product.The study reports on a process analysis of the means by which the company was induced to reinstate a discontinued product. The analysis is divided into three episodes, each marking a critical phase for the collective. This opens up the way for an examination of the processes of mobilisation, interessement, enrolment and mobilisation, revealing the margins of manoeuvre and how these are negotiated and delimited in the process.

A crowdsourcing design framework for concept generation

Abstract In the Internet era, customers become increasingly used to publishing their reviews of products online. This paper presents a crowdsourcing design framework (CDF) that exploits those online customer reviews to support concept generation in conceptual design. CDF guides designers through a systemic qualitative data analysis process to abstract relevant design intelligence based on highlighted customer reviews published by lead users, towards a database of logic propositions, which is queried by designers to increase knowledge and inspire creativity. A controlled experiment shows that CDF significantly enhances novice designers’ ideation effectiveness and improves their innovative design thinking.

Reviewing the Usefulness of Lead User Method

Reviewing the Usefulness of Lead User Method

How Should Organizations Adapt to Youth Civic Engagement in Social Media? A Lead User Approach

Organizations aiming to foster civic engagement, such as government bodies, news outlets, political parties and non-governmental organizations, struggle to purposefully use social media to engage young people. To meet this challenge and to inform future design, we interviewed 17 innovators in engaging youth, that is, frontrunners in using social media to engage young people in organizations. Also, we conducted four group interviews with 21 youth, 16–26 years, about their experiences of and barriers to online civic engagement. Our paper contributes to identifying specific factors and strategies to support young people future online civic engagement. Findings suggest how organizations should involve and collaborate with young people. Immediate feedback and dialog combined with clearly stated goals and action-oriented engagement are important. In future design, visual communication and design for use on mobile devices are an imperative, as well as concepts that connect the online and the offline world. Finally, our paper contributes to an extension of the lead user innovation approach.

Informing regional food innovation through lead user experiments

Purpose– Lead user experiments are increasingly applied in food-related innovation. The purpose of this paper is to: first, experiments should excavate new recipes, production processes and narratives for mussels with a specific regional origin and connotation. Second, the study should test a lead user set-up and investigate the commitment and potential benefits, not only for future mussel producers but also for the lead users themselves.Design/methodology/approach– This study organized and evaluated a lead user experiment involving eight chefs and other food experts.Findings– The experiment was successful in the sense that the lead users activated a considerable combinatory knowledge ability and creativity, and they could address issues of wider regional branding significance and contribute with catching narratives. The lead users found the experiment beneficial on several dimensions, providing the opportunity to reflect and undertake tests under respectfully inquisitive observation of others, and they also appreciated the opportunity openly to expose their own professionalism on various media that were organized as ingredients in this experiment.Practical implications– The study accentuates the applicability of lead user experiments as supplements or alternative to other ways of informing product development processes and demonstrates a practical method.Originality/value– The study contributes to the increasing methodological evidence in the field of lead user-based innovation and scrutinizes the issues in a wider food industry context.

A Mobile Internet Service for Self-Management of Physical Activity in People With Rheumatoid Arthritis: Challenges in Advancing the Co-Design Process During the Requirements Specification Phase.

BackgroundUser involvement in the development of health care services is important for the viability, usability, and effectiveness of services. This study reports on the second step of the co-design process.ObjectiveThe aim was to explore the significant challenges in advancing the co-design process during the requirements specification phase of a mobile Internet service for the self-management of physical activity (PA) in rheumatoid arthritis (RA).MethodsA participatory action research design was used to involve lead users and stakeholders as co-designers. Lead users (n=5), a clinical physiotherapist (n=1), researchers (n=2) with knowledge in PA in RA and behavioral learning theories, an eHealth strategist (n=1), and an officer from the patient organization (n=1) collaborated in 4 workshops. Data-collection methods included video recordings and naturalistic observations.ResultsThe inductive qualitative video-based analysis resulted in 1 overarching theme, merging perspectives, and 2 subthemes reflecting different aspects of merging: (1) finding a common starting point and (2) deciding on design solutions. Seven categories illustrated the specific challenges: reaching shared understanding of goals, clarifying and handling the complexity of participants’ roles, clarifying terminology related to system development, establishing the rationale for features, negotiating features, transforming ideas into concrete features, and participants’ alignment with the agreed goal and task.ConclusionsCo-designing the system requirements of a mobile Internet service including multiple stakeholders was a complex and extensive collaborative decision-making process. Considering, valuing, counterbalancing, and integrating different perspectives into agreements and solutions (ie, the merging of participants’ perspectives) were crucial for moving the process forward and were considered the core challenges of co-design. Further research is needed to replicate the results and to increase knowledge on key factors for a successful co-design of health care services.

The Social Network Position of Lead Users

The field of lead user research has seen a great deal of attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, we still lack a full understanding of the nature of users with high potential for innovation. In this paper, we employ a social network perspective on lead users. Increasing the realism of our research in three empirical studies with different empirical settings and methods, we provide robust evidence that lead users have a distinctive social network position: They exhibit an unusually high level of “betweenness centrality,” meaning that they are positioned as bridges between different social groups. This finding has two major implications for lead user theory. First, it consolidates seminal conceptual work on lead users and their embeddedness in social networks. And second, the findings extend and validate prior work on the social network perspective of lead users by combining theoretical insights from cognitive psychology, research on creativity, and network theory. As the social network positions of individuals can be mapped quickly and at low cost with modern Web mining tools, our findings may point to a new and readily applicable approach for the efficient and effective identification of lead users in real‐life projects, an aspect that is usually emphasized as the most crucial activity in lead user projects.

Innovation theories applied to the outdoor sports sector: Panorama and perspectives

Due to the diversification of its ever-changing markets, the socio-economic sector of outdoor sports constitutes a unique vantage point from which to observe intensive innovative situations. The goal of this article is to provide a multidisciplinary overview at the crossroads between sociology and management science, and to conduct a cross-sector literature review with the aim of answering the following question: How do researchers interested in outdoor sports address the topic of innovation? Model application, concept deployment, theory borrowing and, where necessary, theory refinement constitute the central theme of this contribution. After defining the accepted meanings of innovation and highlighting the influence of classic innovation paradigms, the authors will demonstrate that the case of outdoor leisure sports has provided fresh ground for two theoretical bases in particular (firstly, Lead User Theory related to Von Hippel’s theorization; secondly, socio-technical analysis related to Actor–Network Theory), giving rise to inspiring developments which have the potential to become a reference over time. Focus on their main assets, moreover, will serve as the basis for reflection on their articulation, with a view to providing a realistic and pluralistic explanation of the innovation processes at work.

Leveraging Social Networks to Develop Radically New Products

In this article, the authors consider the nexus of social networks and radically new products. These new products are so innovative that they forge new product categories, and social networks might be particularly fruitful in their development, dissemination, and help to foster growth and acceptance. Several social networks concepts are brought to bear on these issues, from the class diffusion model, to current considerations of lead users and emerging ideas about crowdsourcing. In particular, the classic diffusion model provides parameters to reflect innovative consumer behavior, and it is suggested that, in complement to studies that seek customer traits to identify innovators, social network concepts and indices of degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality are very well suited in identifying customers embedded in social networks whose relational ties are indicative of their likely influence and stature. Next, lead users are considered in the specific context of health care, and it is suggested that online forums provide numerous benefits to customer patients as well as opportunities to health‐care providers. Next, the dynamics of social networks are considered as they apply to cutting‐edge ideas about crowdsourcing, movements that companies are exploring to be radically open to customer feedback and suggestions. This article closes with an example of a novel appeal that bridges social networks and radically new products—the challenge of solving societal difficulties, from food scarcity, to environmental pollutants, to weather patterns, to discovering treatments for cancer or other medical conditions.

Three methods for identifying novel affordances

AbstractWe describe three approaches to identify novel product affordances: affordance of absence; insights from lead users, specifically do-it-yourselfers (DIYers); and natural-language searches. While these approaches were separately pursued, we show their connection to each other in this paper. We begin by describing the affordance of absence, inspired by insights on affordances arising from a lack of resources. For example, in the absence of specialized tools, more general tools are used to accomplish similar tasks. Such absence clarifies how other tools could be modified to add relevant features and identifies critical features of the absent tool. In addition, the temporary removal of physical features and objects enables user interaction in ways that may not emerge in their presence. Affordance of absence has the potential to more fully specify affordances for a given object and to help overcome functional fixedness. For the second approach, we describe insights from DIYers obtained from the “IKEA hackers” online community. We consider DIYers lead users for seeking out and exploiting product affordances, often transforming product functions dramatically. We also discuss their projects through the lens of affordance of absence. For the third approach, we outline our natural-language approach to affordance extraction, beginning with consumer product reviews provided for Canadian Tire, a major Canadian retailer. We describe efforts toward automatically identifying less common affordances, and the use of cue phrases to highlight insightful DIY transformations from the IKEA hackers community. Finally, we comment on the potential value of this work for product design in general.

Automated Discovery of Lead Users and Latent Product Features by Mining Large Scale Social Media Networks

Lead users play a vital role in next generation product development, as they help designers discover relevant product feature preferences months or even years before they are desired by the general customer base. Existing design methodologies proposed to extract lead user preferences are typically constrained by temporal, geographic, size, and heterogeneity limitations. To mitigate these challenges, the authors of this work propose a set of mathematical models that mine social media networks for lead users and the product features that they express relating to specific products. The authors hypothesize that: (i) lead users are discoverable from large scale social media networks and (ii) product feature preferences, mined from lead user social media data, represent product features that do not currently exist in product offerings but will be desired in future product launches. An automated approach to lead user product feature identification is proposed to identify latent features (product features unknown to the public) from social media data. These latent features then serve as the key to discovering innovative users from the ever increasing pool of social media users. The authors collect 2.1 × 109 social media messages in the United States during a period of 31 months (from March 2011 to September 2013) in order to determine whether lead user preferences are discoverable and relevant to next generation cell phone designs.

Developing World Users as Lead Users: A Case Study in Engineering Reverse Innovation

This paper examines the “reverse innovation” of the leveraged freedom chair (LFC), a high-performance, low-cost, off-road wheelchair originally designed for developing countries. A needs study of 71 developed world wheelchair users was conducted through three different data collection efforts. These data were contrasted with studies of 125 developing world wheelchair users, who were shown to be lead users for their developed world counterparts. The GRIT freedom chair (GFC), the developed world version of the LFC, was designed based on results of the study. By recognizing developing country users as lead users, designers can reveal latent needs and create globally disruptive innovations.

The search for innovative partners in co-creation: Identifying lead users in social media through netnography and crowdsourcing

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.

Lead toxicity.

Since the last In-Depth Review of lead toxicity in 2004 there have been further developments with regard to safe exposure levels for lead workers. To advise occupational health professionals of the latest research on the multi-system toxic effects of lead and the implications of this research for setting new safe and appropriate occupational suspension limits. An extensive review of the current literature and an investigation of the database used by lead users to produce their submission under the REACH Regulations. Much of the published research on lead toxicity is on the effects of lead on the general population where blood lead levels are considerably lower than those seen in lead-exposed workers. It is always difficult to compare such studies with those undertaken on exposed workers as they may not be directly comparable and may not have taken into account all confounding variables and the well-acknowledged 'healthy worker' concept. However, it is clear that there is substantial evidence that potential health effects on lead workers may be seen at levels which were previously accepted as 'safe'. There is undoubtedly a narrow margin of safety between current occupational blood lead suspension limits and subclinical effect. As a result, the lead users have produced a voluntary Code of Practice with suspension limits significantly below those seen in some national legislation, particularly the Control of Lead at Work Act 2002.

Understanding the public procurement of innovationPublic Procurement and Innovation: The Role of Institutionsby Max Rolfstam

Policy makers and scholars espouse innovation’s role in economic development and competitiveness. As governments look to support innovation they frequently overlook procurement as a policy instrument. After all, public agencies must purchase goods and services to achieve their mission. This rather mundane and necessary function provides an avenue for governments to contribute directly to innovation as an important lead user by setting standards and exacting superior performance. However, multi-level government institutions debate over appropriate practices. The procurement process at all levels of government certainly merits further analysis. Max Rolfstam investigates public procurement of innovation by EU nations, defining this procurement as ‘purchasing activities carried out by public agencies that lead to innovation’ (p. 12). Public Procurement and Innovation contributes an understanding of how multiple institutions impact procurement, and supplies evidence for the ongoing debate over policies’ role in guiding innovation. Particularly, ex post case analysis of eight procurement projects reveals that institutional factors, more than European Commission (EC) public procurement directives, strongly influence whether projects succeed or fail in realizing their innovative potential.

The negative effect of team’s prior experience and technological turbulence on new service development projects with customer involvement

Purpose – The current study examines the negative moderating effects of team’s prior experience and technological turbulence on the antecedents and consequences of using information provided by customers involved in new service development (NSD). It also examines one way to mitigate the proposed negative effects. Design/methodology/approach – The unit of analysis was NSD projects in which customers had been involved during the development process. A self-administered mail survey was used to collect the data. The proposed model was tested using hierarchical path analysis. Findings – Results show that team’s prior experience reduces the extent to which recorded and shared information from customers involved in NSD is used for project-related decisions during the development process. Findings also reveal that technological turbulence can reduce the positive effect of using information provided from customers involved in NSD on new service advantage and service newness. Finally, results show that involving lead users in NSD can help reduce the negative moderating effects of team’s prior experience and technological turbulence. Originality/value – The literature on information use suggests that availability of information does not guarantee its use. In keeping with this argument, the current study reveals that for NSD projects with customer involvement, team’s prior experience and technological turbulence are part of the challenge of making effective use of the new knowledge that customers bring to the development project. Firms are advised to collaborate with lead users as a way to attenuate this problem.

Public procurement of innovation and local authority procurement: procurement modes and framework conditions in three European cities

Local authorities present complex implementation settings for public procurement of innovation (PPI) practices and include a range of barriers, yet their proximity to citizens and local economic actors suggests that they are likely to encounter unmet needs in advance of national governments, creating potential to act as lead users. This paper develops a conceptualisation of the local authority procurement environment, using it as a framework for analysing the potential for PPI in three city authorities across Europe, representing three distinct modes of public procurement: functional procurement, tactical procurement and strategic procurement. The paper proposes that local authorities are broadly characterised by cyclical, geographically bounded procurement activity, which contains potential for stimulating incremental innovation through normal procurement activity if the external institutional setting is permissive. The paper suggests conditions for increasing the possibilities for more disruptive innovation through local authority procurement and areas for further research.

Methodology for Emotional Assessment of Product Design by Customers in Virtual Reality

The presented six-step methodology suggests a novel, integrated way of emotional assessment of future products during the early conceptual design stages by the customer. In the first step, the product developers create virtual product concepts. These will be evaluated by the lead user group, which is defined by market researchers within the second step. The third step is the design of the immersive emotional assessment environment, which combines compatible technological solutions for virtual reality and measurements of psycho-physiological data. The experiment in the fourth step consists of preparation and calibration sub-steps and of the product case scenario. After completing the statistical analysis of the experimental results in the fifth step, the variant space is reduced in a customer-centered way. The goal of this methodology is to provide relevant emotional customer feedback during the interactive experience of only virtually existing conceptual product designs at very early development stages and thus to identify emotionally suitable designs. Its novelty aspect lies in the holistic approach through the structured integration of experts from the areas of product development, marketing, virtual reality, and psychology. The presented validation study proved the coherence of the methodology. Furthermore, it showed clear preferences for the application of simple interaction gestures, the PA emotional model, and the measurement of psycho-physiological parameters—especially the zygomaticus major muscle activity—as suitable state-of-the-art solutions for capturing relevant customer emotional feedback in an immersive environment.

Embedded (Lead) Users as Catalysts to Product Diffusion

Firms can harness social user networks not only for ideation, but also to accelerate and facilitate diffusion of new product introductions. They select individuals whose own product adoptions and opinions influence adoption decisions of others. In this paper we transfer this rationale to firm employees. We focus on ‘embedded users’ who are employees of a firm, but at the same time users of the firm's products. We aim to find out if their access to user networks, use experience and lead userness impact their opinion leadership and domain‐specific innovativeness. We also show how cognitive empathy towards external users is a mechanism to explain these relationships. Drawing on the user innovation and consumer behaviour literature, we derive and test eight hypotheses on a sample of 54 firm employees in gaming hardware firms. We find that lead userness is positively related to domain‐specific innovativeness and opinion leadership, but use experience only to the former. Cognitive empathy mediates all relationships in our study. To facilitate embedded users' tendency to act as opinion leaders and to adopt new products, managers should encourage their employees to use the firm's products to build use experience and thus develop cognitive empathy towards external users.

Pioneering customers as change agents for new energy efficiency services—an empirical study in the Finnish electricity markets

Energy companies are in dire need of new business models that bring revenues from energy services rather than from increasing energy use. Smart meters and grids offer new opportunities for such services. However, there is a lack of research on what the market potential of such services could be in end-user markets. Certain innovative consumers are more likely to be the first to test new technology-based services and engage in new service co-creation. However, identification of such innovator or lead user customers is difficult especially for electricity end-use efficiency, an invisible and unexciting service for most consumers. This article identifies pioneering customers for novel energy efficiency services offered by electricity providers in terms of psychological factors from an empirical data collected with a consumer survey in spring 2013. We also analyse the similarities and differences between pioneering customers and the mass market with the principal component analysis. We find that certain characteristics of pioneering customers (expertise, ahead-of-the-market needs) could become more widespread in the market due to rising energy prices and improved billing and metering. However, some other aspects contributing to innovativeness (such as experimentalism) are less likely to develop among average consumers, who are more likely to rely on leading companies and seek recommendations from peers before obtaining new services. These differences among consumers need to be taken into account in order to offer consumers usable and useful products and peer group-relevant marketing.