Clockspeed Effectiveness of Lead Users and Product Experts

What is it about?

lead users are users that experience needs unknown to the public and therefore can innovate by finding solutions to those needs, whereas product experts are external new product development collaborators who have a commercial interest in the development of a new product. Those two collaborators are studied with context to their effect on the organization's capability to quicken its introduction of new products to the markets and harness technological changes in such a way as to enable more rapid product development.

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Why is it important?

This paper have practical implications for manufacturers. It suggests that collaboration with lead users and product experts during the new product development process will help to improve the speed of development, and hence the speed to market. Also, collaboration with lead users will have a greater impact, particularly when undertaken informally, as formal integration may lead to a weakening of lead users' innovative abilities. The paper also contributes to the growing literature, which explores how innovators found outside an organisation can be used to enhance the innovative ability of that organisation. The value of this work is that it identifies and empirically compares the impact of lead users and product experts on new product development speed.

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