Comparing Lead Users to Emergent‐Nature Consumers as Sources of Innovation at Early Stages of New Product Development

Linda Hamdi‐kidar, Peter Keinz, Emmanuelle Le Nagard () and Eric Vernette ()
Additional contact information
Linda Hamdi‐kidar: TBS - Toulouse Business School
Emmanuelle Le Nagard: ESSEC Business School
Eric Vernette: UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse, TSM - Toulouse School of Management Research - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - TSM - Toulouse School of Management - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: The large potential of lead users (LUs) in developing innovative and radically new product concepts is well established in the literature. However, in a widely acknowledged study, Hoffman et al. introduced the new concept of emergent‐nature consumers (ENCs) and showed the superiority of this group of individuals over LUs in developing new product concepts. Consequently, they postulated ENCs to be "the right consumers" to be integrated in new product development processes. In this article, we critically reflect and build on Hoffman et al.'s study and further investigate the promise of the ENC concept as compared to the LU concept. In a pilot study, we replicated the study by Hoffman and colleagues: We conducted a crowdsourcing competition and asked for concepts for new services; those concepts had been generated collectively by the participants and had been assessed by a consumer crowd. In the main study, the participants of a crowdsourcing competition submitted individually generated concepts for products, which were evaluated by industry experts. Across both studies, using different empirical methods in two different contexts, and in contrast to Hoffman et al.'s work, we find support for LUs outperforming ENCs (as well as average users) in generating the commercially most promising concepts. Thus, our insights reinforce the existing user innovation literature and the notion of LUs being the primary source of new product/service concepts.

Keywords: New product development"; " Empirical research" (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Journal of Product Innovation Management, 2019, 36 (5), pp.616-631. ⟨10.1111/jpim.12500⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-02450674

DOI: 10.1111/jpim.12500

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().