دانلود رایگان مقاله مقایسه کاربران داخلی و خارجی به عنوان منابع نوآوری

abstract

External lead users’ ideas are valuable to firms but difficult to access due to their location outside organizational boundaries. A potential solution to this problem is to employ lead users within organizations, i.e. to use internal/embedded lead users. Due to their ability to link knowledge about needs and solutions, internal lead users can be expected to produce better ideas compared to external lead users or ordinary employees. We test this conjecture in the home appliances industry using a sample of 864 employees (283 ideas) and 239 users (66 ideas).We find thatinternal lead users’ ideas are of higher quality than those of ordinary employees and users, but – unexpectedly – are of lower quality than the ideas of external lead users. These findings contribute to research on internal/embedded users by showing how their ideas differ from ideas from other relevant sources of innovation. Our findings contribute also to research on external users’ compared to employees’ ideas as inputs to new product development and the literature on individual knowledge recombination for innovation.

5. Discussion

5.1. Summary In this paper we use a sample of 864 employees (283 ideas) and 239 users (66 ideas) to investigate whether internal lead users generate better ideas (in terms of originality, user value, and market potential) than ordinary employees, external lead users, and ordinary users. Our predictions are not fully supported: internal lead users generate ideas of higher originality and user value than ordinary employees and users do, but the highest quality ideas measured on those dimensions come from external lead users. In relation to market potential, location of the individual inside or outside the organizational boundary has no effect: internal and externalleadusersproduce ideas withhighermarketpotentialthan the ideas of ordinary users and ordinary employees.