Lead User Analyses for the Development of New Industrial Products

Another version of this paper is available in the Sloan Working Papers collection at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/2145.

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Urban, Glen L (Author), von Hippel, Eric A (Author)
Other Authors: Sloan School of Management (Contributor)
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), 2020-09-10T17:57:19Z.
Subjects:
Online Access:Get fulltext
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100 1 0 |a Urban, Glen L  |e author 
100 1 0 |a Sloan School of Management  |e contributor 
700 1 0 |a von Hippel, Eric A  |e author 
245 0 0 |a Lead User Analyses for the Development of New Industrial Products 
260 |b Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS),   |c 2020-09-10T17:57:19Z. 
856 |z Get fulltext  |u https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127234 
520 |a Another version of this paper is available in the Sloan Working Papers collection at https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/2145. 
520 |a Recently, a "lead user" concept has been proposed for new product development in fields subject to rapid change (von Hippel [von Hippel, E. 1986. Lead users: A source of novel product concepts. Management Sci. 32 791-805.]). In this paper we integrate market research within this lead user methodology and report a test of it in the rapidly evolving field of computer-aided systems for the design of printed circuit boards (PC-CAD). In the test, lead users were successfully identified and proved to have unique and useful data regarding both new product needs and solutions responsive to those needs. New product concepts generated on the basis of lead user data were found to be strongly preferred by a representative sample of PC-CAD users. We discuss strengths and weaknesses of this first empirical test of the lead user methodology, and suggest directions for future research. 
655 7 |a Article 
773 |t Management Science