Nikolaus Franke (Vienna University of Economics and BA)
Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School of Management, USA)

Vienna University of Economics and BA and
MIT Sloan School of Management, USA

Lead users are defined as having both of two characteristics: (1) they expect relatively high benefits from innovating and (2), they have needs that are at “the leading edge of the market” relative to important marketplace trends. It has been proposed that manufacturers and others might be able use this construct to selectively identify users likely to be experiencing needs for – and perhaps developing prototype solutions for – commercially-attractive, “leading edge” new products and services. In this project, we conduct a first test of this hypothesis, drawing upon data collected from “webmaster” users of Apache security-related software modules.