In recent years, more and more consumer goods firms have started to tap into the creative potential of their user communities in order to fuel their new product development pipelines. While many have hailed this paradigm shift as a highly promising development for firms, there is hardly any...

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead user theory are needed to inform and guide these efforts. In this paper we empirically test and confirm the basic tenants of lead user...

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead user theory are needed to inform and guide these efforts. In this paper we empirically test and confirm the basic tenants of lead user...

Lead users are proposed as a valuable resource for marketers in terms of the (1) development, (2) adoption, and (3) diffusion of new products. We present the first consumer study to provide evidence that the latter two suggestions are justified. First, we find that lead users demonstrate...

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead user theory are needed to inform and guide these efforts. In this paper we empirically test and confirm the basic tenants of lead user...

Generating ideas for new products used to be the exclusive domain of marketers, engineers, and/or designers. Users have only recently been recognized as an alternative source of new product ideas. Whereas some have attributed great potential to outsourcing idea generation to the “crowd” of...