Research On Leaduser-based Customer Participation In New Product Development

To obtain competitive advantage in an environment based on time-competition, an enterprise must introduce customer participation in whole process of new product development. In fact, letting a lot of confumers participate directly into NPD without filtering them first will result in high cost and low effeciency for development process. On the other hand, as existing study showed, lead user paticipation will make the development more effecient and lower cost, and the creative ideas from lead users are more valuable and can bring new product to a success. But these literatures only focus on discussing the advantage of lead user; they don't discuss how to identify leadusers and what the improved development process would be if lead user is introduced. The purpose of this paper is to find a common way to identify lead users, and try to build a new product development process model based on lead user's participation.This paper makes a research on lead users in customers who participate in the new product development with a case-based theoretical method. The main contents include:(1) Analysis the participation propensity of lead users. The research content is as following: Researches the significanse of participation propensity; builds a psychological rule of customer participation propensity; researches the participation propensity of lead user, and how it affects the lead user behavior when participate in development.(2) Research a common method to identify lead users. The research content is as following: points out that the core of lead user's leadership is his super customer competencies; builds a hirechy model for the four key customer competencies of development; builds a common model that identifies lead user by measuring customer competencies.(3) Discuss how to make a common user become a lead user. The research content is as following: points out that bringing up a common user to lead user by promoting their competencies is possible; discusses how to promote the most important 4 competencies for participating NPD; points out that competency can be promoted more efficiently by using E-method, and potential lead users can be found during promoting competencies by E-method.(4) Build a new NPD process that involves lead user participation. The research content is as following: comprises existing common development process and the process involved lead user participation, points out improvements in Demand Gather, Scenario Design, Prototype Development and Testing phases in development process; builds a complete development process with lead user participation, including bring up a common user to lead user, identify lead user, obtain lead user solutions, develop user innovation toolbox, cooperate with lead users, etc, which didn't exist in legacy development process.For this topic, there are still many pending issues need to be concerned, such as dynamic identifying lead user, keeping loyalty of lead user, quantifying the participation propensity of lead user, etc. These will be studied in future researches.