This study investigates the origins of disruptive innovation. According to the canonical model, disruptive innovations do not originate from existing customers - in contrast with what the user innovation literature would predict. We compiled a unique historical and content-analytic dataset based...

This paper is the first to study the organizational behavior of “embedded lead users” (ELUs) – employees who are lead users of their employing firm's products or services. Most of the literature views producers and users as organizationally distinct. Employing lead users is a novel mode...

Innovation has traditionally been seen as the province of producers. However, theoretical and empirical research now shows that individual users – consumers – are also a major and increasingly important source of new product and service designs. In this paper, we build a microeconomic model...