Lead Users

Who are Lead Users?

As described by Eric von Hippel from MIT Sloan School of Management, “lead users have two characteristics; first, they have high incentives to solve a problem (their needs) and second, they are the head of the target market and so what they want in the present will be a demand of the market as a whole in the future (as shown in the figure)”. For example, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, needed hypertext and network computers for its own work and that’s why he developed it and now WWW as a result was invented to fulfill the market need as a whole.

Why lead users are important?

Many well known innovative firms are using lead users' innovations as a source for solving challenges in producing new products and services. For example, 3M as one of the greatest innovator firms use them in a method, named Lead User Research Method, to save its declining medical department with new ideas for production. They actually did a great effort to find relative lead users from completely various fields and gather their experiences and innovations in dealing with problems relative to their main challenges in producing new product.
Lead User research method is actually a systematic way for innovation while it keeps enough flexibility for growing innovation. It has four major phases that lead firms to extract market needs and innovative ways of dealing with them in order to develop innovation solutions for meeting that needs. These phases are:
1- Project Planning (takes 4 to 6 weeks)
2- Trends/Needs Identification (takes 5 to 6 weeks)
3- Preliminary Concept Generation (takes 5 to 6 weeks)
4- Final Concept Generation (takes 5 to 6 weeks)