Mary. Sonnack’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

Les techniques traditionnelles de génération d'idées, fondées sur les contributions de clients, consistent généralement à collecter de l'information sur des besoins en nouveaux produits à partir d'un ensemble de clients typiques ou alors choisis de façon aléatoire. L'approche faisant appel aux « utilisateurs pionniers » s'en démarque. Elle consiste à collecter des informations sur les besoins et les solutions émanant d'utilisateurs à la pointe des nouveautés sur le marché cible, ainsi qu'à partir de clients d'autres marchés rencontrant le même type de problématique mais plus accentuée. Cet article fait part d'une expérimentation naturelle conduite dans l'entreprise 3M, sur l'impact du processus de génération d'idées à l'aide d'utilisateurs pionniers (UP) comparé à des méthodes plus traditionnelles. 3M est renommé pour ses capacités d'innovation, nous trouvons d'ailleurs que le processus UP semble améliorer ces capacités. Les ventes annuelles du produit moyen financé généré par le projet UP chez 3M sont projetées de façon conservatrice à 146 millions de dollars après cinq ans (plus de huit fois supérieures aux prévisions de ventes des idées de produit générées à partir du projet « traditionnel »). Il est projeté que chaque projet UP financé créera une nouvelle gamme majeure de produit pour une division particulière de 3M. Il en découle que les divisions qui financent des idées de projet UP projettent leur meilleur taux de génération de gamme majeure de produit depuis les cinquante dernières années.

Traditional idea generation techniques based on customer input usually collect information on new product needs from a random or typical set of customers. The "lead user process" takes a different approach. It collects information about both needs and solutions from users at the leading edges of the target market, as well as from users in other markets that face similar problems in a more extreme form. This paper reports on a natural experiment conducted within the 3M Company on the effect of the lead user (LU) idea-generation process relative to more traditional methods. 3M is known for its innovation capabilities--- and we find that the LU process appears to improve upon those capabilities. Annual sales of LU product ideas generated by the average LU project at 3M are conservatively projected to be $146 million after five years---more than eight times higher than forecast sales for the average contemporaneously conducted "traditional" project. Each funded LU project is projected to create a new major product line for a 3M division. As a direct result, divisions funding LU project ideas are projecting their highest rate of major product line generation in the past 50 years.

Most senior managers want their product development teams to create break-throughs--new products that will allow their companies to grow rapidly and maintain high margins. But more often they get incremental improvements to existing products. That's partly because companies must compete in the short term. Searching for breakthroughs is expensive and time consuming; line extensions can help the bottom line immediately. In addition, developers simply don't know how to achieve breakthroughs, and there is usually no system in place to guide them. By the mid-1990s, the lack of such a system was a problem even for an innovative company like 3M. Then a project team in 3M's Medical-Surgical Markets Division became acquainted with a method for developing breakthrough products: the lead user process. The process is based on the fact that many commercially important products are initially thought of and even prototyped by "lead users"--companies, organizations, or individuals that are well ahead of market trends. Their needs are so far beyond those of the average user that lead users create innovations on their own that may later contribute to commercially attractive breakthroughs. The lead user process transforms the job of inventing breakthroughs into a systematic task of identifying lead users and learning from them. The authors explain the process and how the 3M project team successfully navigated through it. In the end, the team proposed three major new product lines and a change in the division's strategy that has led to the development of breakthrough products. And now several more divisions are using the process to break away from incrementalism.

Cover title. "January 1999." Includes bibliographical references (leaf 19). Eric von Hippel and Mary Sonnack.