Customer and user-driven innovation

6 important questions on Customer and user-driven innovation

Why involve users in innovation?

- Users often experience shortcomings for existing solutions
- User involvement may reduce uncertainty and ambiguity in the product development process
- If knowledge of user needs is sticky, users are more likely to innovate

What are lead users?


• Lead users face needs that will be general in the marketplace - but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and

• Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to those needs.

Name three types of lead users


1) Lead users in the target application and market;

2) Lead users of similar applications in advanced “analog” markets;

3) Lead users with respect to important attributes of problems faced by users in the target market.
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Describe the Lead-user Method

1. Start
2. Identification of Needs and Trends
3. Identification of lead users
4. Concept design

What is a user community? What are its strengths? Innovation barriers?

- Innovative users share thoughts and artifacts with their peer community
- Interaction based on trust and shared norms and values, not on formal contracts

Strengths:
- Facilitates diversity, a broad set of knowledge can be used to develop solutions
- Accumulative innovation
- Identification of attractive ideas and effective identification of flaws

Innovation barriers:

• Established producer may lose control of the innovation process
• Difficult to allign the interests of the user community and the company
• Maintain a perception of fairness with respect to the commercialization of IP
• Competitors may arrise from the user community

What are potential threads of involving users in the innovation process?

• Involving the wrong users
• Over searching and over valuing external information
• Risk of opportunistic behavior and knowledge leakage
• Focusing too much on the needs of existing customers

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