TY - JOUR
T1 - The Social Network Position of Lead Users
AU - Kratzer, Jan
AU - Lettl, Christopher
AU - Franke, Nikolaus
AU - Gloor, Peter
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - The field of lead user research has seen a great deal of attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, we still lack a full understanding of the nature of users with high potential for innovation. In this paper, we employ a social network perspective on lead users. Increasing the realism of our research in three empirical studies with different empirical settings and methods, we provide robust evidence that lead users have a distinctive social network position: They exhibit an unusually high level of betweenness centrality, meaning that they are positioned as bridges between different social groups. This finding has two major implications for lead user theory. First, it consolidates seminal conceptual work on lead users and their embeddedness in social networks. And second, the findings extend and validate prior work on the social network perspective of lead users by combining theoretical insights from cognitive psychology, research on creativity, and network theory. As the social network positions of individuals can be mapped quickly and at low cost with modern Web mining tools, our findings may point to a new and readily applicable approach for the efficient and effective identification of lead users in real-life projects, an aspect that is usually emphasized as the most crucial activity in lead user projects.
AB - The field of lead user research has seen a great deal of attention from academics and practitioners alike. However, we still lack a full understanding of the nature of users with high potential for innovation. In this paper, we employ a social network perspective on lead users. Increasing the realism of our research in three empirical studies with different empirical settings and methods, we provide robust evidence that lead users have a distinctive social network position: They exhibit an unusually high level of betweenness centrality, meaning that they are positioned as bridges between different social groups. This finding has two major implications for lead user theory. First, it consolidates seminal conceptual work on lead users and their embeddedness in social networks. And second, the findings extend and validate prior work on the social network perspective of lead users by combining theoretical insights from cognitive psychology, research on creativity, and network theory. As the social network positions of individuals can be mapped quickly and at low cost with modern Web mining tools, our findings may point to a new and readily applicable approach for the efficient and effective identification of lead users in real-life projects, an aspect that is usually emphasized as the most crucial activity in lead user projects.
UR - https://www.wu.ac.at/fileadmin/wu/d/i/entrep/4_forschung/full-text-papers/kratzer_lettl_franke_gloor_2015_network_position_lead_user.pdf
U2 - 10.1111/jpim.12291
DO - 10.1111/jpim.12291
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0737-6782
VL - 33
SP - 201
EP - 216
JO - Journal of Product Innovation Management
JF - Journal of Product Innovation Management
IS - 2
ER -