Synergies among Producer Firms,Lead Users,and User Communities: The Case of the LEGO Producer–User Ecosystem

While many firms today proactively involve users in their new product development efforts using a wide variety of methods such as the lead user method, firm‐hosted user communities, or mass customization toolkits, some pioneering firms are experimenting with the creation of sustainable producer–user ecosystems designed for the continuous exploration and exploitation of business opportunities. In this paper, the functioning of such ecosystems is studied with particular emphasis on the synergies they can yield. Based on an explorative and longitudinal multiple case study design, the producer–user ecosystem of the firm LEGO is analyzed, and three main actors in the ecosystem are identified: entrepreneurial lead users who aim to start their own businesses, a vibrant user community, and the LEGO company as the focal producer firm and facilitator for multiple user‐to‐user and user‐to‐producer interactions. Our study reveals three kinds of synergies: (1) reduced risk for entrepreneurial lead users and the focal producer firm, (2) the extension of the design space of the focal producer firm's products, and (3) the creation of buzz within the user community. Finally, the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings for innovation researchers and practitioners are discussed.     

The Lead User method: an outline of empirical findings and issues for future research

In order to reduce the risks of failure usually associated with NPD, leading companies such as 3M, HILTI, or Johnson&Johnson are increasingly working with so-called Lead Users. Their identification and involvement is supported by the Lead User method – a multi stage approach aiming to generate innovative new product concepts and to enhance the effectiveness of cross-functional innovation teams. While the Lead User method is frequently cited in the literature, yet, there are only limited attempts to comprehensively discuss how this approach is embedded in theories and empirical findings of innovation and marketing research. Therefore the Lead User method is in the focus of the present paper, both with respect to its theoretical foundation and its implementation into the innovation management system. First, empirical research on user innovations is reviewed to clarify the theoretical foundation of the Lead User method. Second the attention is drawn to the Lead User practice by discussing the various process steps of this specific approach on the basis of two applications of the method. Based on this discussion, we outline open questions related with the practical implementation of the Lead User method in order to start an agenda for future research.     

Extending Lead‐User Theory: Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Lead Userness*

Lead users are found to come up with commercially attractive user innovations and have been shown to be a highly promising source of innovation for new product development tasks. According to lead‐user theory, these users are defined as being ahead of an important market trend and experiencing high benefits from innovating. The present article extends lead‐user theory by exploring the antecedents and consequences of consumers' lead userness in the course of three studies on extreme sports communities. Regarding antecedents, it uncovers that field‐related variables (consumer knowledge and use experience) as well as field‐independent personality variables (locus of control and innovativeness) help explain an individual's lead userness. These variables might therefore be used as a proxy to identify the rare species of lead users. With regard to consequences, it uncovers that lead users demonstrate innovative behavior not only by creating new product ideas but also by adopting new commercial products more heavily and faster than ordinary users. This highlights the idea that lead users might not only be valuable to idea‐generation processes for radically new concepts; instead, they might also be relevant to more general issues in the marketing of new products.     

用户异质、网络非中立与公共政策:基于双边市场视角的研究

本文通过构造比较静态与比较动态模型,对基于网络服务提供商平台两边用户异质情形下平台各层次配置相应内容流量的接入服务定价机制的网络投资激励与社会福利的效应进行了研究。发现,在数字化的网络提供商平台实行网络非中立的流量带宽配置,可以实现利益相关者均衡,满足在既定带宽下的不同服务需求,从而消除平台用户的交易外部性;不同接入速率敏感度的服务歧视,可以形成内容提供商一边的竞争,从而改善内容质量;网络服务提供商平台层次逻辑结构之间存在的相关性,使网络服务提供商可以利用杠杆效应,对平台的其他层次施加市场势力;在给定物理网络管制的情形下,强制性在网络其他层次推行网络中立管制会给平台的最优定价结构带来斯彭斯价格扭曲,而且加剧下游的竞争。     

The Influence of Leadership and Member Attitudes in Understanding the Nature of Union Participation

There has been a growth of interest among industrial relations scholars in the functions of union leadership at both national and local levels. This paper presents a survey-based analysis of the impact of union leaders on member participation in Cypriot public-sector trade unions. It indicates that active leaders promote participation both directly and indirectly, through their influence on members' attitudes towards the union. The study emphasizes the importance of leadership in facilitating further understanding of member participation in trade unions.     

Exploring How Peer Communities Enable Lead User Innovations to Become Standard Equipment in the Industry: Community Pull Effects

Literature on new product development indicates that on average around 40% of new products fail across different industries (e.g., Crawford, 1977 ; Crawford and Di Benedetto, 2008 ). Out of those that survive only few become widely accepted standard equipment in the industry (Utterback, 1996 ). Literature on entrepreneurship (e.g., Baron and Shane, 2008 ) and on innovation (e.g., Christensen, 1997 ) shows that such innovations often originate outside the boundaries of established firms. However, it is difficult to understand and analyze the exact source of such innovations and the entrepreneurial processes by which they are developed. It is therefore the aim of this study to shed light on how innovations become widely accepted by large segments of the market and specifically which demand‐side forces are at work. An approach suitable for pursuing this objective is to focus on those individuals who are on the leading edge with respect to an important market trend (lead users) and their respective peer communities. As little knowledge is available, an explorative case study design is applied, working with cases from two different industries, specifically the medical equipment and sporting equipment industry. A longitudinal research design is used, extracting data from multiple respondents and various other sources such as reports, publications, databases, or community web pages. The research framework takes a process perspective by following the entrepreneurial processes from invention to commercialization and diffusion. In this process, micro‐level variables at the individual and group level are analyzed as well as the barriers to be overcome by the individual innovator and the community. The findings show that communities play a central and active role in the entrepreneurial process. Community members provide valuable feedback on the overall potential of the lead users' ideas, participate by making concrete development contributions, acting as testers of the new products, and finally helping to diffuse the innovations inside and outside the community. We identify two pull effects on the part of the community: first, community members demand and facilitate the development of prototypes; and second, community members help to cross the chasm between first adopters and the early majority. This paper has various implications for entrepreneurship and innovation research. For entrepreneurship, this article points out peer communities as a specific kind of social network that plays a crucial role in entrepreneurial processes. For innovation research, this article emphasizes the interaction between lead users and their peer communities in the process of developing the next dominant product design.     

Understanding the Antecedents,Contingencies, and Performance Implications of Process Innovation: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective

This paper examines one of the most important sources of competitiveness in dynamic industries—the capability of firms to introduce process innovations. While the management of product innovation has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the literature, our knowledge about how firms become process innovators—and why many firms fail to do so—remains underdeveloped. In order to provide novel insights into the configuration of firms' process innovation activities and their performance implications, this paper draws on the dynamic capabilities approach. More specifically, this study aims to shed light on the antecedents, contingencies, and performance consequences of interfirm differences in process innovation success, that is, firms' propensity and effectiveness of implementing new production, supply chain, or administrative processes. Particular emphasis is placed upon the analysis of potential complementarities or substitution effects between innovation activities such as internal and external research and development, prototyping, external knowledge acquisition, and employee training. Cross‐sectional data from a large‐scale survey of German manufacturing and service firms serves as the basis for testing the hypotheses advanced in this paper. Findings suggest that by engaging in a broad range of different innovation activities, firms can indeed increase the likelihood of achieving process innovation success, which is in turn positively related to firm financial performance. Yet decreasing marginal returns to innovation activities have to be considered as process innovation propensity was found to increase with the number of activities pursued simultaneously only up to a point, after which negative marginal returns set in (inverted U‐shaped relationship). Furthermore, while environmental turbulence was found to have surprisingly little influence when it comes to translating process innovation success into firms' subsequent financial performance, industry membership as well as the nature of the innovation process (i.e., internal generation, external adoption, or cocreation of an innovation) emerged as key contingency factors. These findings have important theoretical as well as practical implications for managing new process introductions.     

FROM EXPERIENCE: Developing New Product Concepts Via the Lead User Method: A Case Study in a "Low-Tech" Field

Conventional market research methods do not work well in the instance of many industrial goods and services, and yet, accurate understanding of user need is essential for successful product innovation. Cornelius Herstatt and Eric von Hippel report on a successful field application of a "lead user" method for developing concepts for needed new products. This method is built around the idea that the richest understanding of needed new products is held by just a few users. It is possible to identify these "lead users" and then draw them into a process of joint development of new product concepts with manufacturer personnel. In the application described, the lead user method was found to be much faster than traditional ways of identifying promising new product concepts as well as less costly. It also was judged to provide better outcomes by the firm participating in the case. The article includes practical detail on the steps that were used to implement the method at Hilti AG, a leading manufacturer of products and materials used in construction.     

城市群视角下的产业共聚与产业空间治理:机器学习算法的测度

城市群是未来中国产业发展的主要空间载体与重要地理单元。本文在机器学习Wasserstein距离算法思想的基础上,运用矩阵扩张Sinkhorn算法和熵正则化约束法改进Wasserstein距离算法及其求解方式,通过假设检验与蒙特卡洛模拟构建产业共聚指数,测算中国城市群的产业共聚水平。测度结果发现,中国城市群同二位数行业内产业间的共聚水平大于跨二位数行业产业间共聚水平;经济相对落后的城市群表现出明显的产业共聚特征,同时技术密集型产业在上述城市群内部偏向共聚;2007—2013年间中国城市群产业空间共聚水平总体呈下降态势,不同城市群的演化模式存在差异。本文还利用产业共聚指数的方向性,分析了不同城市群产业空间核心产业的差异,绘制出城市群产业空间结构。对产业共聚影响因素的实证研究发现,投入产出关联、技术关联与规模差距对产业间共聚的影响显著为正,行业内部竞争水平从共聚和被共聚两个方向抑制产业间共聚趋势;城市群层面诸如政府规模等区域特征均与产业间共聚水平负相关。据此,本文提出了实施城市群产业空间治理的相应政策建议。     

高频视角下创业板市场的非对称尾部风险度量

创业板汇集了大批高成长性的科技企业,面临着高度不确定的市场风险。本文考虑创业板市场的非对称性和厚尾性,在偏t分布下利用5分钟高频数据构建已实现GARCH模型衡量其波动率,同时考虑到微观结构噪声影响,在RV的基础上引入对噪声稳健的BPV已实现测度,从而提升高频VaR模型的预测准确性。对创业板指和深证成指的实证结果表明,已实现GARCH模型在参数显著性和模型预测准确性方面均优于低频下的ARMA-fGARCH-VaR模型;基于RV和BPV的已实现模型没有显著差异;相比于深市主板,创业板面临的尾部风险更大。同时,为更好地监测与管控创业板市场风险,从政府和创业企业两个层面提出对策建议。     

Moving Toward a Global Understanding of Upward Influence Strategies: An Asian Perspective with Directions for Cross-Cultural Research

We begin with a review of the upward influence literature for the past twenty years. In particular, we examine the extent to which upward influence behavior is congruent with the value dimensions proposed in the established values research and the extent to which the U.S. based measures are applicable in the Asian context. A model of cross-cultural influence behavior is developed to synthesize the present state of our knowledge in cross-cultural upward influence, and to provide a framework for identifying issues requiring further investigation. We conclude by proposing a set of cross-cultural research questions identified in the model.     

Finding Commercially Attractive User Innovations: A Test of Lead‐User Theory*

Firms and governments are increasingly interested in learning to exploit the value of lead‐user innovations for commercial advantage. Improvements to lead‐user theory are needed to inform and to guide these efforts. The present study empirically tests and confirms the basic tenets of lead‐user theory. It also uncovers some new refinements and related practical applications. Using a sample of users and user–innovators drawn from the extreme sport of kite surfing, an analysis was made of the relationship between the commercial attractiveness of innovations developed by users and the intensity of the lead‐user characteristics those users display. A first empirical analysis is provided of the independent effects of its two key component variables. In the empirical study of user modifications to kite‐surfing equipment, it was found that both components independently contribute to identifying commercially attractive user innovations. Component 1, the high expected‐benefits dimension, predicts innovation likelihood, and component 2, the ahead of the trend dimension, predicts both the commercial attractiveness of a given set of user‐developed innovations and innovation likelihood due to a newly proposed innovation supply side effect. It was concluded that the component variables in the lead‐user definition are indeed independent dimensions, so neither can be dropped without loss of information—an important matter for lead‐user theory. It also was found that adding measures of users' local resources can improve the ability of the lead‐user construct to identify commercially attractive innovations under some conditions. The findings reported here have practical as well as theoretical import. Product modification and development has been found to be a relatively common user behavior in many fields. Thus, from 10 to nearly 40 percent of users report having modified or developed a product for in‐house use in the case of industrial products or for personal use in the case of consumer products in fields sampled to date. As a practical matter, therefore, it is important to find ways to selectively identify the user innovations that manufacturers will find to be the basis for commercially attractive products in the collectivity of user‐developed innovations. The implications of these findings for theory as well as for practical applications of the lead‐user construct are discussed—that is, how variables used in lead‐user studies can profitably be adapted to fit specific study contexts and purposes.     

Risk and the User Cost of Housing Services

This paper derives a risk-adjusted user cost for housing services, capable of application in price indexes, demand, and the measurement of income and returns to homeownership. The risk-adjusted user cost is the after-tax sum of an interest rate and a risk premium, less expected capital gains. Expected capital gains are based on a factor pricing specification. It is shown that both national and local factors affect capital gains on housing.     

User Cost and the Demand for Housing Attributes

A number of studies have related changes in the demand for housing to changes in user cost. All have treated housing as a composite good rather than as a bundle of characteristics. We consider the effect of changing user cost on the demand for the component characteristics of owner-occupied housing, and, given information about the supply of the characteristics, we predict implicit price responses. An empirical test of our model indicates that reductions in user cost result in higher real prices for the non-replicable attributes of housing, examples being location and access to fixed amenities. In contrast, the price of attributes that are perfectly elastic in supply are not affected by changes in user costs. We conclude that the effects of changing user cost are not uniform across housing types and locations, thus generating the appearance of housing submarkets.     

Comparing Lead Users to Emergent‐Nature Consumers as Sources of Innovation at Early Stages of New Product Development

The large potential of lead users (LUs) in developing innovative and radically new product concepts is well established in the literature. However, in a widely acknowledged study, Hoffman et al. introduced the new concept of emergent‐nature consumers (ENCs) and showed the superiority of this group of individuals over LUs in developing new product concepts. Consequently, they postulated ENCs to be “the right consumers” to be integrated in new product development processes. In this article, we critically reflect and build on Hoffman et al.'s study and further investigate the promise of the ENC concept as compared to the LU concept. In a pilot study, we replicated the study by Hoffman and colleagues: We conducted a crowdsourcing competition and asked for concepts for new services; those concepts had been generated collectively by the participants and had been assessed by a consumer crowd. In the main study, the participants of a crowdsourcing competition submitted individually generated concepts for products, which were evaluated by industry experts. Across both studies, using different empirical methods in two different contexts, and in contrast to Hoffman et al.'s work, we find support for LUs outperforming ENCs (as well as average users) in generating the commercially most promising concepts. Thus, our insights reinforce the existing user innovation literature and the notion of LUs being the primary source of new product/service concepts.     

Understanding B2B and the Web: the acceleration of coordination and motivation

This paper explores business-to-business (B2B) marketing on the Internet, and how the confluence of the two may transform the B2B landscape. Specifically, it discusses the notion of linkage value to demonstrate why the B2B phenomenon on the Internet is so significant. It then considers the mechanisms and enablers that have made the Web such an important B2B marketing channel. It also explores how the Web can reduce transaction costs, thereby facilitating more efficient exchanges and markets. The concepts of links and nodes are then introduced and the processes of disintermediation, reintermediation, disaggregation and reaggregation are explored. Finally, Web B2B configurations are considered by way of a model that describes four archetypal configurations, and the factors that are antecedent to these modes and how the Web may influence them.     

提高员工满意度是提高用户满意度的前提

论述了通过提高员工综合素质,提高员工工作的主动性与创造性,进而提高用户满意度的必要性,并从加强员工培训与提高员工满意度两方面论述了如何提高员工综合素质,着重从提高员工满意度方面进行了系统阐述。在如何提高员工满意度方面,又从6个方面进行了详细论述。     

Taxes and the User Cost of Capital for Owner-Occupied Housing

Owner-occupied housing is said to be favored in the tax code because the return on owner's equity is not taxed and mortgage interest and property taxes can be deducted in the computation of one's income tax base. The special tax treatment reduces the user cost of capital for owner-occupied housing.
The issue treated in this paper is the measurement of the tax rate to be employed in the user cost calculations. It is argued that different tax rates are appropriate for the tenure choice and quantity-demanded decisions, and that these values depend on the detailed tax position of the household and the method of finance. Average 1977 tax rates for household in different income ranges are calculated using the NBER TAXSIM microeconomic data file on individual tax returns.