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Lead users are sometimes the source of radical innovations, but most often they bring about incremental innovations that are likely, through accumulation and enrichment, to modify products and techniques to a greater or lesser extent. Take, for example, the development of materials and expert gestures in windsurfing in Hawaii (Shah 2000), and the adaptation and stylization of kayaking materials (Hienerth 2006; Hyysalo 2009). Analyzing the emergence and growth of Nordic walking, Pantzar and Shove (2010) also mention the need to take into account, alongside lead users, ordinary users whose role is somewhat underestimated. In this respect, the description of food techniques in different forms of sports itinerancy illustrates the great creativity of even the most ordinary sportsmen and women: repackaging, using things for different purposes, fashioning things themselves, etc. (Boutroy and Vignal 2018).

Beyond the questioning of the monopoly of innovation capacities held by industrialists alone and the demonstration of the specific functioning of lead user communities, the essential contribution of the LUT is to show how companies can be inspired and fed by users’ achievements. Cases of co-production with lead users are not rare. This process of open innovation provides manufacturers with a wealth of information on the contexts of use, which would be difficult to access by other means (for example, a series of formal tests). In this respect, user creativity is a positive externality for the commercial world, which may have an interest in developing processes of innovation through use.