early adopter
New Economy: Markets Shaped by Consumers
Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that a huge swath of innovation can be traced to elite consumers whom he calls lead users. These imaginative and technically adept consumers spot a need and invent a solution, often changing whole industries, from sports to software.
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Ahhh a refreshing read from the NY Times. Lead users, early adopters all very good indeed. Not really new info for me but I like seeing it in the press, helps boost awareness to the cause.
Hopefully Lextant will be able to surf a few waves on this kind of press. The research itself is exciting provided you can spot the lead user. A lead user isn't just a gadget guy or notable trend, to me, its a progressive wave you can track thru different means.
Where do lead users get their start? College? Dropouts? Highschool? How about where they hang out? Coffee Shops and bars? Maybe bookstores?
I've worked on three projects where we had to idenify, discover and investigate lead users, often called early adopters. Most were college students or recent grads just beginning to shake down life for their piece of the pie.
It was fun learning from lead users researching their values, their approach not just on the fields they were exploring but on their overall view of life. Its not to say that open minded folks are lead users, but there is I think a mix of personality traits that lead us to lead users.
Course firms these days are like this article points out very interested in lead users. In mass they will shift the market, they will make others notice, its like a force, a wave about to it. Spotting the wave is good, setting the wave is better, knowing the make up of a wave even better, put yourself in the hits club, keep on hittin.
All the hooopla over social networking software yadda dadda is still a bit in the kettle to me. Sure things like AOL and SMS on phone technology have made a signifcant dent on how teens especially communicate, that is cleary evident, both in the research projects ive worked on and my own self analysis of that, yet this trend of things like Friendster, Tribes, MySpace, Ryze, etc.. the jury isnt out on that yet. Needs more time to cook. I feel like alot of those are steps to something bigger.
Lead users often set trends, trend spotting has always been an incredible lure for me, I love being able to spot a trend, wager in my mind if is to come to pass, and often being rewarded mentaly when it does. The more I look into trends the more I want to understand what forms them, the right mix of elements and lead users are only a piece of puzzle, important no doubt but not singled out as the soul motivator for keeping a trend alive.