Manufacturers design their innovation processes around the way they think the process works. The vast majority of manufacturers still think that product development and service development are always done by manufacturers, and that their job is always to find a need and fill it rather than to sometimes find and commercialize an innovation that ______________________________. Accordingly, manufacturers have set up market-research departments to explore the needs of users in the target market, product-development groups to think up suitable products to address those needs, and so forth. The needs and prototype solutions of lead users ― if encountered at all ― are typically rejected as outliers of no interest. Indeed, when lead users’ innovations do enter a firm’s product line ― and they have been shown to be the actual source of many major innovations for many firms ― they typically arrive with a lag and by an unusual and unsystematic route.
* lag: 지연