Lead Users and Non-Lead Users : Reconsidering Formal Procedures for Breakthrough Preference Measurement

Today, lead user integration and conjoint analysis are widely known and commonly used methods that help companies develop new products. On the one hand, conjoint analysis concentrates on the preferences of customers and consequently helps to generate incremental innovations for a profitably sized market. On the other hand, lead user integration concentrates on extraordinary users to generate breakthrough innovations to address future mainstream needs. Both approaches have their shortcomings. In this paper we propose the so called Voice-of-the-Customer Integrated Lead User Approach and show its usefulness for NPD. We analyse if lead users and non-lead users differ in form of their preferences and if this reduces the risk of unprofitable product developments. The data collection is based on low-cost online experiments and was done in the well-known application field of mountain biking. The new approach generates about thirty new improvements to mountain biking equipment and reveals significant differences in preference measurement. Thus, the new approach seems to be a promising one and reveals lead user and non-lead user insights based on a combined approach