Читать книгу Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation - Simon Richir - Страница 26

The lead user concept was developed by Von Hippel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. To understand who the lead users are, we need to go back to the mechanics of innovation diffusion described by Everett Roger. According to this approach, we consider that when a product is launched, we will first have a few users called “innovators” who are few in number, but interested enough in innovations that they are very easy to convince to buy an innovative product. Then come the “early adopters”, who are a little more numerous and a little more resistant, although they are very interested in innovation, and so on, with the early majority, the late majority and finally the late adopters, who are only likely to be interested in an innovation when it is very widely diffused and established in society. In Von Hippel’s conception, the lead users are the few individuals who are even further upstream than the innovators described by Everett Roger, that is even before the commercial release of the product.

Lead users have two important characteristics:

 – they are ahead of the major trends in the evolution of uses and they recognize the needs before the others;

 – they have an advantage and skills that lead them to innovate by themselves by developing the solution to their need.

Thus, lead users use prototypes to satisfy their needs before a commercial product can do so. In this sense, they are considered sources of innovation.

In theory, one might think that it is very easy to create radical innovations and always be one step ahead of the market by integrating lead users into the innovation process. In practice, we only know for sure that someone was ahead of the curve later on. Survivor syndrome, which is very common in the world of innovation, comes into play, giving us the opportunity to see the success of genius visionaries who “feel” the future and the evolutions to come. After the fact, it is safe to say that the founder of Oculus is a lead user and that the purchase of his company by Facebook to integrate it into its strategy is an illustrative success. It is a success, but let us not forget that it is because it was a success that this case is famous. In any case, lead users are often opinion leaders in their field because of their very strong expertise.

To identify lead users in a given field of activity, Von Hippel described a method called “pyramid”. It involves asking experts who they think are the best experts in the field, then going to them and asking the same question, and so on until you have a workable list of five or six names of people to interview who will be at the top. You have potentially got your hands on some lead users in your field! The next step is to analyze the usage of these few specialists and identify the types of technologies they use to meet the needs you want to address. If their usage leads you to other areas of expertise, you can then repeat the process of identifying lead users in these other areas of expertise.