Abstract
An innovative product or system changes or has the potential to change the nature of the marketplace by satisfying a new (or latent) user need or by satisfying user needs in a signi?cantly new way. While the keystone of an innovative product development process is need identi?cation, common methods often only produce incremental in-novation. Lead user theory however may be a solution. In particular in this paper we expand the concept of lead user to cover users from the developing world. This is inspired by the process of “reverse innovation”, where products are ?rst designed for poor markets and then adapted into rich markets. A study of 71 developed world stakeholders was conducted through three di?erent data collection e?orts to see if developing world user needs, represented by a collective of the previously studied 125 developing world stakeholders, could be shown to be lead users. Indeed, developing country users lead developed world users because developing world user experience a signi?cant bene?t from a solution and developed world users have the same needs expressed earlier by developing world users as lead users. These needs were prioritized and used to design a developed world version of the case study Leveraged Freedom Chair (LFC), in order to investigate if these developing world lead users could identify needs that can be used to deliberately engineer a reverse innovation by systematically translating the prioritized needs into actionable engineering functional requirements. The resulting GRIT Freedom Chair (GFC) was assessed using a previously validated innovation framework and shown to be an innovation with potential market success.