User Innovation in B2B Sector

Motivated by the existing lack of theoretical knowledge on the user-driven innovations on the organizational level with the theoretical gap in literature on user-driven innovations in the B2B sector, this research is focused on the lead user-driven innovations on the firm level in the B2B sector. Herewith, one of the major part of this research was the new conceptualization of lead user-driven innovation, successfully applied in this research. Traditionally lead users are not juridically involved in the company activities. In this research lead users instead are workers and directly involved in the manufacturing processes that affects their involvement into innovative activities. With that, this is not the case of workplace/employee innovations as workers do not have tasks to create technological solutions which mostly serve as positive externalities in terms of overall need to improve efficiency of manufacturing. The core research question was related to the major motives of users’ engagement in innovation processes: “What are the main reasons of workers’ involvement into innovation creation in B2B sector?”.