Sample frameDay 210·Innovation · Users

Somebody has already built a rough version of what you're planning. They made it out of parts, for themselves, and they're using it today.

Innovation.

Lead Users

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The question

The last time you went looking for what to build next, whose desk did you go to — the reasonable, representative, available customer who'd give you a considered opinion about the thing you'd already half decided on? I'll answer for you: that's who nearly everyone asks, because they're easy to reach and they're polite. The people who could have told you something you didn't know had stopped waiting and built it themselves.

The idea

Eric von Hippel, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, spent a career demonstrating something the marketing literature had assumed away: users innovate. His 1976 study in Research Policy examined a hundred and eleven scientific instrument innovations and found that around eighty per cent of those judged by users to deliver a significant gain in functional utility had been invented, prototyped and first field-tested by users, not by the manufacturers who eventually sold them. In 1986, in Management Science, he named the pattern and made it operational. A lead user has two properties and needs both: they face needs that will be general in a market months or years before the bulk of that market encounters them, and they stand to benefit significantly from a solution — which is why they don't wait for one. Ahead of the curve without a strong incentive gives you a commentator. Strong incentive without being ahead gives you a complainer. Together they produce somebody who has already built something, and that rough build carries a need statement, a design, and a list of rejected alternatives you'd otherwise pay a year of development to discover.

The framework

01
Who is two years ahead of your market — and paying for it today?
The method starts with a trend, not a person. Write the direction your market is moving in one sentence — cheaper, faster, more regulated, more automated — because a lead user only exists relative to that trend. Then look for the people already living at its far end and carrying real cost for doing so: the customer running your product at ten times normal volume, the operator working under a rule that reaches everyone else next year, the team whose scale broke your assumptions last spring. Being early isn't sufficient on its own. The pain is what produces the build.
02
Analogous fields — where your problem is already extreme.
The richest lead users often sit outside your market entirely, somewhere the same problem turns up in harsher form. When 3M's Medical-Surgical Markets Division ran the lead user process on infection control, it went to veterinary surgeons, who hold infection down on patients that are covered in hair, never bathe and carry no insurance. The payoff got measured: Gary Lilien and colleagues, publishing with von Hippel in Management Science in 2002, found the average lead user project at 3M carried a conservative fifth-year sales forecast of $146 million — more than eight times the forecast for the average traditional project running alongside it.
03
Their workaround is the brief. The product is in what they changed.
When you find one, don't ask what they think of your roadmap. Get the thing they built in front of you and read it as a specification: what they added, what they stripped out, what they put up with, and what they tried first and abandoned. Every one of those is a priced trade-off made by somebody with skin in it, which is a different class of evidence from an opinion. Then ask what it still does badly — the gap between their hack and their need is the part you're being paid to close.
04
Pyramid your way there rather than screening a thousand people.
Mass surveys are a poor instrument for finding rare people, because rare people are, by definition, almost never in the sample. Von Hippel, Nikolaus Franke and Reinhard Prügl set out the alternative in Research Policy in 2009: pyramiding, which rests on the observation that people with a strong interest in a subject tend to know who is better at it than they are. You ask each person who they'd go to with a harder version of the problem, then follow the referral. A handful of hops gets you somewhere a thousand-person screen never would, because each referral skips most of the population instead of sampling it.

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