User characteristics for customer involvement in innovation processes : deconstructing the Lead User-concept

Despite the growing evidence of the beneficial nature of customer and user involvement in new product or service development, research into user types and customer characteristics for innovation is still scarce. One notable exception can be found in the literature dealing with the so-called Lead User. Although there is a substantial research corpus dealing with Lead User innovation, the integration of Lead Users or Lead User-methods is definitely not common within most firms. We believe that disentangling the Lead Userconcept into more concrete user types and customer characteristics would benefit and optimize user involvement in innovation processes. Within this paper, we describe six user types based on five dimensions, associated with the Lead User-concept and abstracted from various literature streams. We further propose some guidelines for an optimal integration of these users within innovation methodologies and sketch out some lines for future research