Online–Offline Integrated Value Innovation Ecosystem: A Lead User Perspective

Social media accelerates the interaction between customers and stakeholders. Inevitably, the construction of a sustainable online–offline value innovation ecosystem represents an opportunity but also a challenge, especially for the electronics industry with its short-life-cycle products and high development costs. In light of this trend, this article puts forward, from a lead-user-participation perspective, a systematic and intelligent method for multiple excellent participants' identification. Particularly, these very active users from the online community provide obvious merit for product innovation and development. Using data-mining techniques, this method effectively analyzes the users' online data that has been collected and creatively combines index evaluation with biclustering analysis to deal with the high-dimensional behavioral and review data of users. Thus, the matching results of various lead user groups offer good preparation for offline coproduction. As a typical online innovative platform of Xiaomi Tech, the MIUI community, is employed for the detailed illustration, which well demonstrated such an in-depth form of cooperation for fast product development and win–win co-creation in the digital era.