ABSTRACT
LEAD USERS The notion of lead users became popular in marketing in the 1990s as an antidote to the problem of rapidly changing markets and competition from new products. Despite rationally managed new product development processes and sophisticated market research, marketers knew the failure rate of new products was greater than 90%. However, based on earlier work, researchers already knew that in many fields users not only knew much more about their needs than market researchers, but in many instances actually developed most of the innovations in their industry. For example, 82% of commercialized scientific instruments were developed by users rather than producers. And the origin of many new firms was linked to the commercialization of products users had developed for themselves, often as enthusiasts. For example, mountain bikes and desktop computers were both commercialized in the 1970s by entrepreneurs who started off as mountain bike and computer enthusiasts (von Hippel, 1986).
