Читать книгу Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation. How Virtual and Augmented Reality Enables the Co-Creation of Concepts онлайн

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 – they are ahead of the major trends in the evolution of uses and they recognize the needs before the others;

 – they have an advantage and skills that lead them to innovate by themselves by developing the solution to their need.

Thus, lead users use prototypes to satisfy their needs before a commercial product can do so. In this sense, they are considered sources of innovation.

In theory, one might think that it is very easy to create radical innovations and always be one step ahead of the market by integrating lead users into the innovation process. In practice, we only know for sure that someone was ahead of the curve later on. Survivor syndrome, which is very common in the world of innovation, comes into play, giving us the opportunity to see the success of genius visionaries who “feel” the future and the evolutions to come. After the fact, it is safe to say that the founder of Oculus is a lead user and that the purchase of his company by Facebook to integrate it into its strategy is an illustrative success. It is a success, but let us not forget that it is because it was a success that this case is famous. In any case, lead users are often opinion leaders in their field because of their very strong expertise.