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The consumer may seem to be nothing more than a tactician, capable of playing with innovations designed by market professionals. By developing the lead-user theory (LUT), Von Hippel (2005) pushes the consideration of the user to the point of affording him or her a “lead role” in the innovation process. More so than the early adopter, according to Rogers, who approves or diverts manufacturers’ innovations, the lead user is a developer of specific products or services that the market does not yet know how to use or does not yet want to use. Von Hippel was interested in lead users (or “pioneer users”) in the creation of “informational goods” (such as software), but also in the manufacture of “material goods”, with a particular focus on the sports sector, which is teeming with creativity carried by these user-innovators.

The lead user is generally an expert in the activity concerned, but he is also characterized by a willingness to tinker. He may even rationalize the process to the point of creating a “mock laboratory” to test and compare different solutions. He also sometimes seizes the opportunity to use his close circle and/or custom manufacturers to obtain resources. Although important compromises are made at this stage (due to time, money, etc.), this low-cost innovation niche is likely to produce prototypes with novel functionalities. The solutions thus generated are generally shared with other users who will examine them, comment on them, imitate them, test them and eventually appropriate them (modifying and enriching them in the process, in many cases). This sharing, based on a free and generalized free access opposed to intellectual protection (close to the open-source movements (Von Hippel 2013)), is very frequent among most lead users². Favoring the dissemination and circulation of knowledge, their approach is not necessarily disinterested because it is the source of symbolic benefits (recognition, notoriety, status) within communities of practice.

By definition, the number of user-innovators is greater than the number of people working in the R&D departments of companies in the sports sector. Beyond the diversity of needs expressed by this mass of sportsmen and women, another element that explains the effectiveness of these communities, in terms of innovation, can be evoked: technical expertise and cognitive diversity are a source of creativity. Von Hippel supports the idea that innovation is all the more effective when it is elaborated collectively; on the one hand, through the successive addition of improvements and transformations made by others; on the other hand, because of the heterogeneity of needs and the capacity of users to imagine solutions to lead to a stable (and generalizable) form of progress. The collective activity of lead users, especially when mediated by structured communities of practice, offers manufacturers a large amount of information about the stated needs, envisaged solutions, and, indirectly, potential markets. This information is all the more useful to manufacturers because it is either unavailable or extremely costly to obtain. Sometimes, companies only have to reproduce prototypes developed and progressively optimized in this way, thanks to the virtues of this “distributed innovation”.

Von Hippel, and a growing number of researchers with him, were particularly interested in sport. The invention and spectacular spread of the mountain bike is an example. In the United States, in the early 1970s, elite sportsmen who wanted to ride off-road and were dissatisfied with the existing bicycles decided to build their own equipment. To get around on rough terrain, they cobbled together bicycles by assembling pre-existing elements (old solid frames, wide tires, motorcycle brakes, etc.). Gradually, these prototypes were taken up, perfected and developed by user-manufacturers, and only then were they recovered and generalized by the bicycle industry (Büenstorf 2003). Subsequently, users have continued to invent new equipment due to the diversification of mountain bike practice (subspecialties according to terrain, practice conditions, modalities – touring, downhill, etc.), giving rise to other unmet needs (Lüthje et al. 2005). In the development of kitesurfing, Franke et al. (2006) have also highlighted the essential role of kite surfers in the improvement (incremental innovation) of equipment, by adapting and diverting equipment, in an iterative and collective way. These authors underline the efficiency of this bottom-up mode of innovation (open innovation, user-centered innovation, or community-based innovation), which is confirmed by the safety improvements obtained in this way in the field of wing safety releases (Hillairet 2012). A study of innovation practices in four sports communities – canyoning, gliding, boardercross and cycling – suggests that, on average, 20–30% of practitioners have already modified or created their equipment (Franke and Shah 2003).

Lead users are sometimes the source of radical innovations, but most often they bring about incremental innovations that are likely, through accumulation and enrichment, to modify products and techniques to a greater or lesser extent. Take, for example, the development of materials and expert gestures in windsurfing in Hawaii (Shah 2000), and the adaptation and stylization of kayaking materials (Hienerth 2006; Hyysalo 2009). Analyzing the emergence and growth of Nordic walking, Pantzar and Shove (2010) also mention the need to take into account, alongside lead users, ordinary users whose role is somewhat underestimated. In this respect, the description of food techniques in different forms of sports itinerancy illustrates the great creativity of even the most ordinary sportsmen and women: repackaging, using things for different purposes, fashioning things themselves, etc. (Boutroy and Vignal 2018).

Beyond the questioning of the monopoly of innovation capacities held by industrialists alone and the demonstration of the specific functioning of lead user communities, the essential contribution of the LUT is to show how companies can be inspired and fed by users’ achievements. Cases of co-production with lead users are not rare. This process of open innovation provides manufacturers with a wealth of information on the contexts of use, which would be difficult to access by other means (for example, a series of formal tests). In this respect, user creativity is a positive externality for the commercial world, which may have an interest in developing processes of innovation through use.