Extending Lead‐User Theory: Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers' Lead Userness*
通过三项极限运动社区研究，发现消费者知识、使用经验及人格变量（控制点、创新性）是领先用户性的前因，领先用户不仅创造新产品想法，还更快更多地采用商业新品，对营销有启示。
Lead users are found to come up with commercially attractive user innovations and have been shown to be a highly promising source of innovation for new product development tasks. According to lead‐user theory, these users are defined as being ahead of an important market trend and experiencing high benefits from innovating. The present article extends lead‐user theory by exploring the antecedents and consequences of consumers' lead userness in the course of three studies on extreme sports communities. Regarding antecedents, it uncovers that field‐related variables (consumer knowledge and use experience) as well as field‐independent personality variables (locus of control and innovativeness) help explain an individual's lead userness. These variables might therefore be used as a proxy to identify the rare species of lead users. With regard to consequences, it uncovers that lead users demonstrate innovative behavior not only by creating new product ideas but also by adopting new commercial products more heavily and faster than ordinary users. This highlights the idea that lead users might not only be valuable to idea‐generation processes for radically new concepts; instead, they might also be relevant to more general issues in the marketing of new products.