{"site":{"name":"Koji","description":"AI-native customer research platform that helps teams conduct, analyze, and synthesize customer interviews at scale.","url":"https://www.koji.so","contentTypes":["blog","documentation"],"lastUpdated":"2026-10-11T09:51:48.833Z"},"content":[{"type":"documentation","id":"ba66cfe6-7daa-49a9-8676-1f7e93d13882","slug":"lead-user-method","title":"The Lead User Method: How to Find Customers Who Are Ahead of the Market","url":"https://www.koji.so/docs/lead-user-method","summary":"The lead user method, developed by Eric von Hippel at MIT, finds people who face a need months or years before the rest of the market and who benefit enough from solving it that many have built their own fixes. Teams pick a trend, search for the people furthest along it (often in analogous fields) by screening or pyramiding, interview them about what they have built, and develop concepts with them in a workshop. At 3M, ideas from the average lead user project were forecast to sell $146 million a year after five years, more than eight times traditional projects (Lilien et al., 2002).","content":"# The Lead User Method: How to Find Customers Who Are Ahead of the Market\n\n**The short answer:** the lead user method finds the small group of people who already face a need the rest of the market will face later, and who care about it enough to have built their own fixes. You identify a trend, search for the people furthest along it, often outside your own market, and learn from the solutions they have already made. Eric von Hippel at MIT developed the method in the 1980s. In a study at 3M, lead user projects produced ideas forecast to sell more than eight times as much as ideas from the company's usual methods.\n\nMost customer research asks typical customers what they need. That works for improving what exists. It works badly for breakthroughs, because typical customers can only describe needs they already feel. Lead users feel them first.\n\n## What is a lead user?\n\nVon Hippel defined lead users by two traits. In his words, lead users \"face needs that will be general in a marketplace, but face them months or years before the bulk of that marketplace encounters them\", and they \"are positioned to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to their needs\".\n\nBoth traits matter:\n\n- **Ahead of the trend.** Their situation today looks like the market's situation tomorrow. A hospital treating a new class of infection, a bank running into a regulation before it spreads, or a creator already publishing in ten languages.\n- **High expected benefit.** The need costs them enough that they are willing to invest in a solution. That is why so many of them have already built one: a workaround, a script, a modified tool, sometimes a working prototype.\n\nThat second trait is the practical reason the method works. You are not asking people to imagine the future. You are studying solutions that already exist in rough form.\n\nUser innovation is more common than most teams assume. In a study of 153 buyers of outdoor sports products, Christian Lüthje (2004) found that 37% had come up with ideas for new or improved products, and more than 9% had built prototypes or even marketable products. Among 136 firms using printed circuit board design software, Urban and von Hippel (1988) found that 24.3% had developed or built their own version for their own use.\n\n## Lead users vs power users vs early adopters\n\nThese three groups get mixed up, and the difference decides who you recruit.\n\n![Comparison of lead users and power users, showing how they differ in where they come from, what they know and what research with them is good for.](/visuals/lead-users-vs-power-users-comparison/lead-users-vs-power-users-comparison.png \"Power users show how to get more from today's product; lead users show where the market is going\")\n\n- **Power users** are your heaviest current customers. They know your product inside out, and they are the right people for improving it. See [power user interviews](/docs/power-user-interviews).\n- **Early adopters** are the first to buy new products in a category. They adopt solutions; they do not usually create them.\n- **Lead users** are defined by their need, not by their relationship with you. Many have never used your product. The most useful ones often sit in an _analogous field_: a different market that faces an extreme version of the same problem.\n\nThe analogous field is the method's most distinctive idea. In the 3M project that von Hippel, Stefan Thomke and Mary Sonnack described in Harvard Business Review (1999), a team looking for cheaper ways to prevent surgical infections learned from specialists in veterinary hospitals, who keep infection rates very low, and from Hollywood make-up artists, who work with materials that are gentle on skin and easy to remove. Neither group was a typical buyer of surgical drapes, but both had already solved parts of the problem.\n\n## Why it works: the evidence\n\nThe best-known test of the method comes from 3M. Gary Lilien, Pamela Morrison and colleagues compared lead user projects with traditional idea-generation projects run at the same company during the same period (Management Science, 2002). They found that annual sales of ideas from the average lead user project were conservatively forecast at $146 million after five years, more than eight times the forecast for the average traditional project. A summary of the study published when it came out reported that the lead user ideas also had a higher market share in year five, 68% on average against 33% for other ideas.\n\nTwo caveats are worth stating. The 3M figures are sales forecasts, not realised sales, and lead user projects are more expensive and slower than a round of customer interviews. The method earns its cost when you are looking for a new product line or a new direction, not a feature tweak.\n\n## How to run a lead user study\n\nThe steps below are a practical sequence built from how lead user projects are usually run. Expect weeks, not days, for a full project.\n\n![Process showing five steps of a lead user study: set the scope, find the trends, search for lead users, interview them, and build concepts together.](/visuals/lead-user-method-five-step-process/lead-user-method-five-step-process.png \"Most of the time goes into steps 2 and 3: knowing the trend and finding the people furthest along it\")\n\n### 1. Set the scope\n\nAgree on the market or problem area, the kind of result you want (a new product line, a service, a new strategy) and how far ahead you want to look. Lead user work is generative. If the team has already chosen the solution, run concept testing instead.\n\n### 2. Find the trends\n\nList the trends that will change what people in your market need: new regulations, new technology, new behaviour, rising costs. Talk to experts and read widely. The aim is to pick one or two trends that matter, because lead users are only \"lead\" relative to a trend. Someone who is ahead on cost pressure may be behind on automation.\n\n### 3. Search for lead users\n\nThere are two ways to find them.\n\n**Screening** means surveying many people and picking out those who score high on both traits: how far along the trend they are, and how much they would gain from a solution. Screening works when lead users are reasonably common in a population you can reach.\n\n**Pyramiding** (also called networking) means asking each person you speak to who they know that is even further ahead, and following the chain. It relies on the fact that people deep in a field tend to know who is deeper still. In four experiments, von Hippel, Franke and Prügl (Research Policy, 2009) found that pyramiding located the single most expert person in a group after interviewing about 28.4% of the group on average, and one of the top three after about 15.9%. When lead users are rare, pyramiding is usually far cheaper than screening everyone.\n\nGood pyramiding questions:\n\n- \"Who do you know who has gone further with this than you have?\"\n- \"Who do people in your field go to when they hit this problem?\"\n- \"Is there another industry that deals with a more extreme version of this?\"\n\n### 4. Interviewing lead users\n\nLead user interviews are about what the person has done, not what they would like. Ask them to walk through the problem as they experience it today, what they have tried, and what they built or changed. Ask to see the workaround. Probe for why they made each choice, what it cost them, and what still does not work.\n\n![A maker at a workbench showing a homemade prototype, the kind of workaround a lead user interview sets out to find](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1590880795696-20c7dfadacde?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3w5NDUzMDN8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwxfHx3b3Jrc2hvcCUyMHdvcmtiZW5jaCUyMGhhbmRtYWRlJTIwcHJvdG90eXBlfGVufDF8MHx8fDE3OTE2OTc4MTF8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080)\n\n_Photo by [Adam Patterson](https://unsplash.com/@adampatterson?utm_source=koji&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=koji&utm_medium=referral)_\n\nTreat their solution as evidence, not as the answer. A lead user's homemade tool shows you the need and some of the design constraints; your job is to work out the version the wider market will want in a few years.\n\n### 5. Build concepts together\n\nTraditional lead user projects end with a workshop where a handful of lead users, often from different fields, work with the company's team to develop concepts. This is where the ideas get combined and stress-tested. Agree on terms for any ideas they contribute before the workshop, not after.\n\n## Common mistakes\n\n- **Recruiting power users and calling them lead users.** Heavy use of your product is not the same as being ahead of a trend.\n- **Skipping the trend work.** Without a clear trend, \"lead\" has no direction and you end up with a list of enthusiasts.\n- **Looking only in your own market.** The most original solutions often come from analogous fields.\n- **Asking for ideas instead of evidence.** \"What should we build?\" gets wish lists. \"Show me what you built\" gets insight.\n- **Treating lead users as representative.** By definition they are not. Validate the resulting concepts with mainstream customers before you invest.\n\n## How Koji helps\n\nKoji runs AI-moderated interviews by voice, text or phone call, and it fits the parts of a lead user project that need many conversations run the same way: screening, pyramiding and the first round of lead user interviews. The concept workshop stays with your team.\n\n- **Screen for both traits at scale.** Add screening questions that check whether someone works in the area at all, then use scale questions inside the interview to measure how far along the trend they are and how much the problem costs them. Every answer lands in the report, broken down by option, so you can see who scores high on both. The [structured questions guide](/docs/structured-questions-guide) covers the question types.\n- **Pyramid in the same conversation.** End each interview with an open-ended question asking who is further ahead and which other fields face a harder version of the problem. Set the follow-up depth so the interviewer asks why they named that person or field.\n- **Interview the people you are referred to.** Import nominated contacts from a CSV and each person gets their own private interview link. Interviews run in 28 languages, which helps when the best lead users are in another country or another industry.\n- **Dig into what they built.** Set follow-ups on the \"what have you tried or built\" question, with your own instructions, so the interviewer asks what the workaround cost, what it does and what still breaks.\n- **Separate lead users from everyone else.** The report's personas group participants by shared needs and behaviour, and every finding links to the interviews behind it, so the small group ahead of the trend does not get averaged away.\n\n![Koji question editor showing open ended, 1 to 10 scale and single choice questions with follow-up settings](/email/shots/shot-question-types.jpg \"Open questions and scales in one interview let you screen and learn at the same time\")\n\nThe trade-off is a fair one to name. A skilled human interviewer can follow an unexpected referral chain on the spot and judge expertise in a way a script cannot. Koji's strength is reach and consistency: you can screen hundreds of people, in their own language and their own time, and spend your team's hours on the dozen who turn out to be ahead.\n\n## Related Resources\n\n- [Power user interviews](/docs/power-user-interviews)\n- [Non-user research](/docs/non-user-research)\n- [Design thinking research](/docs/design-thinking-research)\n- [Screener questions guide](/docs/screener-questions-guide)\n- [Concept testing methodology](/docs/concept-testing-methodology)\n- [Structured questions guide](/docs/structured-questions-guide)\n\n## Sources\n\n- Eric von Hippel, \"Lead Users: A Source of Novel Product Concepts\", _Management Science_ 32(7), 1986.\n- Glen L. Urban and Eric von Hippel, \"Lead User Analyses for the Development of New Industrial Products\", _Management Science_ 34(5), 1988.\n- Eric von Hippel, Stefan Thomke and Mary Sonnack, \"Creating Breakthroughs at 3M\", *Harvard Business Review*, 1999.\n- Gary L. Lilien, Pamela D. Morrison, Kathleen Searls, Mary Sonnack and Eric von Hippel, \"Performance Assessment of the Lead User Idea-Generation Process for New Product Development\", _Management Science_ 48(8), 2002.\n- Christian Lüthje, \"Characteristics of innovating users in a consumer goods field\", _Technovation_ 24(9), 2004.\n- Eric von Hippel, Nikolaus Franke and Reinhard Prügl, \"Pyramiding: Efficient search for rare subjects\", _Research Policy_ 38(9), 2009.\n","category":"Research Methods","lastModified":"2026-10-11T05:50:11.521229+00:00","metaTitle":"Lead User Method: How to Find and Interview Lead Users | Koji","metaDescription":"The lead user method finds people who face tomorrow's needs today. Learn von Hippel's definition, pyramiding vs screening, and how to run a lead user study.","keywords":["lead user method","lead user research","lead users","von hippel lead user","lead user innovation","pyramiding","analogous field research"],"aiSummary":"The lead user method, developed by Eric von Hippel at MIT, finds people who face a need months or years before the rest of the market and who benefit enough from solving it that many have built their own fixes. Teams pick a trend, search for the people furthest along it (often in analogous fields) by screening or pyramiding, interview them about what they have built, and develop concepts with them in a workshop. At 3M, ideas from the average lead user project were forecast to sell $146 million a year after five years, more than eight times traditional projects (Lilien et al., 2002).","aiPrerequisites":["Experience planning customer interviews","A product or innovation question that looks beyond small improvements"],"aiLearningOutcomes":["Define a lead user using von Hippel's two traits","Tell lead users apart from power users and early adopters","Choose between screening and pyramiding to find lead users","Run lead user interviews that collect evidence of what people built","Know when the cost of a lead user project is worth it"],"aiDifficulty":"advanced","aiEstimatedTime":"10 min read"}],"pagination":{"total":1,"returned":1,"offset":0}}