Trajectory of An Idea
By: Robert W. Price
Wall Street Journal: Entrepreneurship and Small Business
Here’s some of the advice that we share with the entrepreneurs that we mentor. Ever since the day that Archimedes, the famous Greek mathematician, leapt from his bathtub and ran through the streets of ancient Syracuse triumphantly shouting Eureka, “I found it!,” the history of science, technology, and business has been punctuated by exciting moments of true insight and discovery.
But a common pitfall for a new business enterprise is the assumption that a large and interested market of potential customers is eagerly awaiting its arrival and offerings. Since venture capitalists do not want to be the first to validate a new business idea, start-ups that will be successful tomorrow are those that can get closest to their customers’ needs today.
In his book The Sources of Innovation, Eric von Hippel, professor of business at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, describes lead users as those who are ahead of the majority of the marketplace. The “lead-user phenomenon” is that lead users are in a unique position to provide accurate, insightful data on needs related to future conditions of the industry, and they are also in a position to benefit significantly if they find a solution to their particular problem.
According to von Hippel, because they often have had to struggle with the inadequacies of existing products, lead users are often able to articulate their emerging needs in new verbiage and concepts. And since they have such an urgent need to solve their immediate problem, they may have already created some sort of solution, parts of a solution, or can provide insights to a product platform that was not considered by the new product development team. In essence, von Hippel observed that “so much practical innovation comes from a small number of imaginative people who tinker with the latest technology.”
Working with lead users is very different from a sales call. The goal is to elicit an honest expression of needs, not to convince a user of what they need, or what they might be doing wrong. For example, Research In Motion (RIM) developed their successful BlackBerry in part by simply asking corporate users what they wanted from a remote e-mail system. It is possible to get valuable information through simple observations. The U.S. Honda automotive design team spent an afternoon in the parking lot at Disneyland observing how people loaded and unloaded the trunks of their cars. They ultimately came up with the design that lowered the opening down to the bumper, a first in automotive design.
There are only a few really important questions that you need to ask lead users:
- What is the real problem here or put another way, what if the product did not exist?
- What are the current attitudes and behaviors of the lead users toward the product?
- What product attributes and benefits do they want?
- What are their dissatisfactions, problems, and unfulfilled needs?
- How are they defining, in their own unique verbiage, what they see, need, and want?
The research with lead users does not have to be expensive or complicated. Abbie Griffin and John Hauser state that as a practical guideline, conducting fewer than ten interviews or observations is probably inadequate, and fifty interviews are too many.
Lead users for new products and services can be found in existing customers, application laboratories in manufacturing partnerships, custom product groups run by industry and trade groups, and other nonprofit user groups.
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Robert W. Price
Executive Director
Global Entrepreneurship Institute
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