Automated identification of different lead users regarding the innovation process

Abstract

Lead users are often established in an organizational innovation process to attenuate the difficulties a company faces, such as high costs or the obscurity of customers’ needs. But to benefit from these lead users a major challenge is to characterize and identify them especially in the fast-moving world of social media. Therefore, we aim to design a tool to identify lead users automatically for the two innovation phases (“Idea generation” and “Development”) by combining different approaches such as social network analysis, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. Thus, we consulted the design science approach and applied our artifact to 11,481 contributions of an online digital platform. The technical realization of the six different characteristics and their respective weighting according to the different phases of the innovation process resulted in different lead users and showed the necessity of distinguishing between them. Our results were evaluated and confirmed by the identified lead users and an expert. Hence, our investigation contributes to both practice and theory (kernel theories and design theory) alike.

Capturing product/service improvement ideas from social media based on lead user theory

“…Von Hippel and Kaulartz (2021) combined semantic models with semantic network analytic methods to identify material relevant to an innovation concept, and obtained the user innovation by a manual filter. Schmid et al (2022) weighted the characteristics of users based on the occurrence of each character in the current research literature and selected lead users using overall scores. Although artificial intelligence technologies offer new possibilities for companies to identify lead users (Bhimani et al, 2019), researchers struggle to build a cohesive body of knowledge from these data‐driven approaches, and conclusions drawn from the technologies may not apply to a general audience (Shin et al, 2020).…”

Application of Anti-wear Technology for Water-cooled Wall of CFB Boilers

“…In engineering practice, ideal materials do not exist, so metal wear is a combination of both types of wear. Isabel's theory of secondary erosion wear clearly explains the wear of brittle particles that erode the surface of a material at a large angle [4]. The theory shows that the particles will secondarily erode the surface of the material after fragmentation and that the degree of fragmentation is related to the kinetic energy of the particles, the impact angle and other influencing factors.…”