Guidelines for finding Lead user like behavior for latent need discovery

Lead users, users that have a need before the general population and that may even have invented a way to solve the need or problem have been proven excellent sources for innovation. However, traditionally these lead users are the top of their field experts or extreme sportsmen and thus few in numbers and hard to find. In this paper we propose potentially useful dimensions for finding greater numbers of users that exhibit lead user like behavior. Three of these dimensions are experimentally tested. Results show that the tested dimensions of ability, age, and degree of development in deed help in finding people with lead user like ability to express latent needs, needs that are shared with but not originally found in regular users.