Lead-User Innovation

Katarina Stanoevska-Slabeva:

"In order to denote the involvement of customers in the innovation process, von Hippel (1978, 1986) described the important role of the user in innovation and introduced the term lead-user innovation. According to him (von Hippel 2005) Lead Users have the following two characteristics: “… they are ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there.” (von Hippel 2005). Thus, lead-user innovation is related to available products, and is based on the experience of the user with the product and his background. Other concepts related to Internet-based innovation that require active users and customers are crowdsourcing, open innovation, open source software development and user innovation communities." (http://berlinsymposium.org/sites/berlinsymposium.org/files/crowdsourcingenabledinnovation.pdf)