مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Innovative ideas generated by external users are valuable because on average, their ideas are of greater novelty and greater user value compared to the ideas generated by employees (Magnusson, 2009; Magnusson et al., 2003; Poetz and Schreier, 2012). However, firms struggle to capture value from external user ideas because they are located outside the organizational boundary (Priem et al., 2012) and firms and users operate under separate thought worlds (Dougherty, 1992). On the one side, firm employees can find it hard to identify user innovators (von Hippel et al., 2009), may misunderstand user ideas (Mahr and Lievens, 2011), or may lack user knowledge or empathy towards users (Homburg et al., 2009). On the other side, user ideas are hard to integrate into firms because users may be unable or unwilling to formulate their ideas (von Hippel, 1994), may have little incentive to share their ideas (de Jong et al., 2015), lack knowledge about organizational processes, or generate ideas that do not fit the organization (Magnusson et al., 2003; Poetz and Schreier, 2012).

One solution to these problems may be internal or embedded lead users, i.e. firm employees who are lead users of their employer’s products or services (Schweisfurth and Raasch, 2015). Internal lead users facilitate organizational innovation by processing external user ideas (Wadell et al., 2013), shaping the corporate culture (Harrison and Corley, 2011), testing prototypes E-mail address: tim.schweisfurth@tum.de (Schweisfurth and Herstatt, 2016), being highly customer-oriented (Schweisfurth and Raasch, 2015), and acting as catalysts for product diffusion (Schweisfurth and Herstatt, 2015). Internal lead users profit from their simultaneous role of user and employee. On the one hand, due to their lead userness, they operate within a need knowledge structure: they experience needs and problems during product use, they speak the language of other users, and they have access to user networks outside the organization. On the other hand, due to their position within the organization, they operate within a solution-based and organizational knowledge structure which external users lack: they have technological knowledge which they can apply to satisfying user needs, they know how to convert ideas into products, and they are aware of the organization’s internal implementation procedures. Thus, internal lead users are expected to produce better ideas than other employees and users based on their ability to combine knowledge structures from their lead user position and their location within the firm: the ability to address diverse knowledge domains generally (Hunter et al., 2008; Koestler, 1969) and from the need knowledge and solution knowledge domain specifically (Lüthje et al., 2005; Poetz and Schreier, 2012; von Hippel, 1994) is positively related to creativity and innovation.

Research so far has not investigated how the ideas generated by internal lead users and external lead users differ. This is an important research gap because external user ideas can be very valuable but difficult for the organization to obtain and implement; internal lead users may be the solution to this problem.