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Lead User
Lead user is a term developed by American economist Eric von Hippel. His definition for lead user is: #Lead users face needs that will be general in a marketplace – but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them, and #Lead users are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to their needs and so may innovate. Lead users are a very important source of innovative progress because they often pioneer - acting earlier than producers to develop important new types of products and applications. Spearheading innovation benefits lead users because they innovate to serve their own needs. For this reason, they need not concern themselves with whether others will also want what they are developing for themselves. In contrast, producers tend to wait for evidence that there is a broad, profitable market to be served before they can justify investing in a new type of innovation. For example, mountain bikes were developed by individuals w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eric Von Hippel
Eric von Hippel (born August 27, 1941) is an American economist and a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializing in the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He is best known for his work in developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation. In 1986 he coined the term lead user to describe this phenomenon. Eric von Hippel is the son of the Arthur Robert von Hippel, a material scientist and physicist who was also a professor at MIT. His mother was Dagmar Franck von Hippel, a daughter of James Franck, a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom." His great-uncle is the German ophthalmologist Eugen von Hippel. von Hippel has been awarded the EU Innovation Luminary Award (2015), the Schumpeter School Prize (2017), and the Portugal Medal of Sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Early Adopter
An early adopter or lighthouse customer is an early customer of a given company, product, or technology. The term originates from Everett M. Rogers' ''Diffusion of Innovations'' (1962). History Typically, early adopters are customers who, in addition to using the vendor's product or technology, also provide considerable and candid feedback to help the vendor refine its future product releases, as well as the associated means of distribution, service, and support. Early adoption could also be referred to as a form of testing in the early stages of a project. The relationship is synergistic. The customer receives early (and sometimes unique, or at least uniquely early) access to an advantageous new product or technology. In return, the customer may also serve as a kind of guinea pig. In exchange for being an early adopter, and thus being exposed to the problems, risks, and annoyances common to early-stage product testing and deployment, the "lighthouse customer" is sometimes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
User Innovation
__NOTOC__ User innovation refers to innovation by intermediate users (e.g. user firms) or consumer users (individual end-users or user communities), rather than by suppliers (producers or manufacturers). This is a concept closely aligned to co-design and co-creation, and has been proven to result in more innovative solutions than traditional consultation methodologies. Eric von Hippel and others observed that many products and services are actually developed or at least refined, by users, at the site of implementation and use. These ideas are then moved back into the supply network. This is because products are developed to meet the widest possible need; when individual users face problems that the majority of consumers do not, they have no choice but to develop their own modifications to existing products, or entirely new products, to solve their issues. Often, user innovators will share their ideas with manufacturers in hopes of having them produce the product, a process call ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Toolkits For User Innovation
Toolkits for user innovation and custom design are coordinated sets of “user-friendly” design tools. They are designed to support users who may wish to develop products or services for their own use. The problem toolkits are developed to solve is that, while user designers may know their own needs better than do producers, their technical design skills may be less than those of producer-employed developers. For example, expert users of tennis rackets – or expert users of custom integrated circuits – generally know more than producers do about the function they want a product (or service) to serve. However, they are often not as good as producer engineers at actually designing the product they need. Purpose Toolkits for user innovation (or design customization) solve this problem in two steps. First, they divide the total set of design problems facing product designers into two categories: # design problems for which users’ special knowledge of a need is important; ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technology Adoption Lifecycle
The technology adoption lifecycle is a sociological model that describes the adoption or acceptance of a new product or innovation, according to the demographic and psychological characteristics of defined adopter groups. The process of adoption over time is typically illustrated as a classical normal distribution or "bell curve". The model calls the first group of people to use a new product " innovators", followed by " early adopters". Next come the "early majority" and "late majority", and the last group to eventually adopt a product are called "laggards" or "phobics". For example, a phobic may only use a cloud service when it is the only remaining method of performing a required task, but the phobic may not have an in-depth technical knowledge of how to use the service. The demographic and psychological (or " psychographic") profiles of each adoption group were originally specified by agricultural researchers in 1956: * innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantitative Marketing Research
Quantitative marketing research is the application of quantitative research techniques to the field of marketing research. It has roots in both the positivist view of the world, and the modern marketing viewpoint that marketing is an interactive process in which both the buyer and seller reach a satisfying agreement on the " four Ps" of marketing: Product, Price, Place (location) and Promotion. As a social research method, it typically involves the construction of questionnaires and scales. People who respond (respondents) are asked to complete the survey. Marketers use the information to obtain and understand the needs of individuals in the marketplace, and to create strategies and marketing plans. Data collection The most popular quantitative marketing research method is a survey. Surveys typically contain a combination of structured questions and open questions. Survey participants respond to the same set of questions, which allows the researcher to easily compare responses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Qualitative Marketing Research
Qualitative marketing research involves a natural or observational examination of the philosophies that govern consumer behavior. The direction and framework of the research is often revised as new information is gained, allowing the researcher to evaluate issues and subjects in an in-depth manner. The quality of the research produced is heavily dependent on the skills of the researcher and is influenced by researcher bias. Data collection Qualitative marketing researchers collect data ranging from focus group, case study, participation observation, innovation game and in-depth interviews. Focus group The focus group is marketing research technique for qualitative data that involves a small group of people (6–10) that share a common set characteristics (demographics, attitudes, etc.) and participate in a discussion of predetermined topics led by a moderator. There are opportunities to conduct focus groups with the use of focus group software. There are many types of focus gro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Product Lifecycle Management
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design, and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises. History The inspiration for the burgeoning business process now known as PLM came from American Motors Corporation (AMC). The automaker was looking for a way to speed up its product development process to compete better against its larger competitors in 1985, according to François Castaing, Vice President for Product Engineering and Development. AMC focused its R&D efforts on extending the product lifecycle of its flagship products, particularly Jeeps, because it lacked the "massive budgets of General Motors, Ford, and foreign competitors." After introducing its compact Jeep Cherokee (X ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Participatory Design
Participatory design (originally co-operative design, now often co-design and also co-creation ) is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. The term is used in a variety of fields e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, industrial design, planning, and health services development as a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs. It is also one approach to placemaking. Recent research suggests that designers create more innovative concepts and ideas when working within a co-design environment with others tha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Observational Techniques
In marketing and the social sciences, observational research (or field research) is a social research technique that involves the direct observation of phenomena in their natural setting. This differentiates it from experimental techniques, experimental research in which a quasi-artificial environment is created to control for spurious factors, and where at least one of the variables is manipulated as part of the experilovement. In context Observational research is a method of data collection that has become associated with qualitative research. Compared with quantitative marketing research, quantitative research and experimental techniques, experimental research, observational research tends to be less reliability (psychometric), reliable but often more validity (psychometric), valid. The main advantage of observational research is flexibility. The researchers can change their approach as needed. Observational research measures behavior directly, rather than the subject's self-re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Learning-by-doing (economics)
Learning-by-doing is a concept in economic theory by which productivity is achieved through practice, self-perfection and minor innovations. An example is a factory that increases output by learning how to use equipment better without adding workers or investing significant amounts of capital. With roots all the way by to Adam Smith's analysis of pin manufacturing, the quantification of the idea was realised from the manufacturing of B17 Flying Fortress bombers during world war II. For B17's the costs reduced proportionally with the cumulative manufacturing, rather than with ongoing volume. This explains the non-linearity of learning-by-doing cost reduction, as seen for example in semiconductor manufacturing or with solar PV production. The concept of learning-by-doing has been used by Kenneth Arrow in his design of endogenous growth theory to explain effects of innovation and technical change. Robert Lucas, Jr. adopted the concept to explain increasing returns to embodi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hipster (contemporary Subculture)
The 21st-century hipster is a subculture (sometimes called hipsterism). Fashion is one of the major markers of hipster identity. Members of the subculture typically do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word ''hipster'' is often used as a pejorative for someone who is pretentious or overly concerned with appearing trendy. The subculture is often associated with indie and alternative music. In the United States and Canada, it is mostly associated with perceived upper-middle-class white young adults who gentrify urban areas. The subculture has been critiqued as lacking authenticity, promoting conformity and embodying a particular ethic of consumption that seeks to commodify the idea of rebellion or counterculture. The term ''hipster'' in its present usage first appeared in the 1990s and became widely used in the late 2000s and early 2010s, being derived from the earlier hipster movements of the 1940s. Hipster culture had become a "global phenomenon" during the early-m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
