Systematic Lead User Identification in Online Communities

In a rapidly changing marketplace, companies stay competitive by bringing new solutions and products to the market that meet the emerging customer needs. Research demonstrates that a small subgroup of engaged customers, called lead users, experience these needs before the rest of the marketplace and develop partial solutions that become successful products. To identify lead users in support of new product development, companies employ survey and crowdsourcing methods that are resource and time consuming. To rapidly and systematically identify lead users,  a data mining approach using large online user communities as data sources, is proposed . In this approach, known offline lead user criteria are extrapolated to online user features, which are then used to build a predictive model to identify lead users in an online community. The aim of the research is to validate the proposed data mining approach by executing several studies in high and low tech domains.