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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS82

capabilities of the product, want the product to achieve something
which does not feature in the manual or see in the product a potential
application perhaps unintended by the manufacturer. For the
enlightened entrepreneur, these users can provide the seeds of
innovative products or services, inspired by wishing ‘if only . . .’

Positioned at the head of the market, and with needs which may extend
beyond those of the typical user, lead users have developed solutions to
overcome the existing product’s limitations.

There are two steps in the lead-user process: the first is to identify lead
users in a given market; the second is to use your creativity in
identifying other markets which face similar problems in more extreme
or sophisticated forms and, crucially, have solved them.

lead users see in the product a potential
application perhaps unintended by the
manufacturer

step one: identifying lead users In 1921, Earle Dickson was
working for Johnson & Johnson and happily married to wife Josephine.
Although married life agreed with Josephine, housekeeping did not –
she suffered far more than her fair share of cuts and burns.

Dickson modified the large surgical dressings then available from
Johnson & Johnson, fixing the small pieces of gauze which he cut from
the large dressings with adhesive tape to whichever part of his accident-
prone spouse had most recently been injured. Tired of creating these
bandages on an ad hoc basis, Dickson started to make them in quantity,
covering the adhesive strip with crinoline fabric so that the adhesive
strip remained fresh.

James Johnson, the company’s president, happened to see Dickson
apply one of the home-made bandages to his own finger, and was so
impressed by the product’s simplicity and convenience that mass
production of Band-Aids® soon followed.62

When Craig Johnston played professional football for Liverpool Football
Club in the 1980s, he analysed the team’s boots to identify how the design
could be improved to enable the players to increase their control of the
ball. On retirement from professional football, he became head of
innovation at Adidas and developed the Predator, which is now the