University of Twente Student Theses
Are social entrepreneurs lead users? : the first scale to retrospectively analyze whether social entrepreneurs are lead users.
Vorst, Jan Moritz van (2016) Are social entrepreneurs lead users? : the first scale to retrospectively analyze whether social entrepreneurs are lead users.
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| Abstract: | Innovations developed by users are ubiquitous nowadays. In previous studies, it has been found that successful and commercially attractive user innovations are developed by so called lead users that have been triggered by personal unmet needs to innovate. Lead users are characterized as being ahead of a trend and they expect to benefit from their innovations. What the present paper conducts is proposing a scale that can measure whether lead users have been triggered by personal unmet needs to innovate and develop commercially attractive social innovations. In other words, the present paper proposes a scale that is in a position to retrospectively measure whether social entrepreneurs are lead users. By examining whether social entrepreneurs are lead users, new insights into the antecedents of social entrepreneurship might be provided and a new avenue that lead users take when they decide to commercialize user innovations might be revealed. Existing scales that aim to determine lead users among user populations have been modified to come up with the proposed scale. The proposed scale finds its origins in Lepoutre, Justo, Terjesen, & Bosma (2013) to identify social entrepreneurs, in Luehtje, Herstatt, & von Hippel (2005) to differentiate between user innovators and non-user innovators, in Franke, von Hippel, & Schreier (2006) to assess the ‘expected benefit’ component and in Franke & Shah (2003) and Vernette, Bej-Becheur, Gollety, & Hamdi-Kidar (2014) to assess the ‘ahead of a trend’ component of the lead user definition. It needs to be noted that the present paper solely modifies existing scales and proposes a scale that meets this research’s objective and does not conduct any statistical measurements that verifies the reliability and validity of the proposed scale or draws any generalizations from the findings. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 85 business administration, organizational science |
| Programme: | International Business Administration BSc (50952) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/70874 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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