Innovative users’ diffusion channel selection: effects of lead userness and tacit need knowledge

ABSTRACT

Innovative users can not only generate ideas for new products, but also self-select whether to share their ideas with peers or producers. Different innovative users have different degree of lead userness, and their ideas are usually rooted in tacit need-related knowledge. Because it has been well established that the characteristics of innovators and their innovations can influence the diffusion of an innovation, there is a conjecture that lead userness and tacit need knowledge can associate with innovative users’ diffusion channel selection. In this paper, we report the first empirical exploration. Based on survey data from 414 innovative users in Japan, we found that lead userness increases their likelihood of commercial diffusion versus peer diffusion and that this relationship is stronger when their needs-related knowledge is relatively explicit. We discuss the implications and limitations of these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Diffusion channel selection
• lead userness
• need
• tacit knowledge
• innovative user
• commercial diffusion

Acknowledgments

I thank Hiroki Sano for his valuable support in checking the linguistic correctness of my questionnaire. I am very grateful for the thoughtful comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editor Markus Perkmann. Errors and omissions are solely the author’s responsibility. This paper is dedicated to Kaiwen Yu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Innovative users can also create firms and directly sell their ideas to the general market. Such user entrepreneurship is another way to disseminate user ideas (Shah & Tripsas, 2007; Yu et al., 2020). Similar to several other studies (De Jong et al., 2018, 2015; Von Hippel et al., 2012), we focus on peer and commercial diffusion because they differ from user entrepreneurship by virtue of passing the intellectual property rights to the users’ idea to others. In our collected sample, relatively few respondents demonstrated a potential for user entrepreneurship.

2. Conscientiousness refers to an individual’s degree of persistence and motivation in the pursuit of goal accomplishment.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Chongqing Municipal Education Commission [19SKGH047]; Social Science Project of Chongqing [2018PY72]; Center for Japanese Studies, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications [2019rbyj06].