In the present study a covariance structure model is tested to identify the causes of entrepreneurial intent among engineering students. Specifically, we explore whether steady personal dispositions or whether perceptions of contextual founding conditions have an impact on the intention to found one's own business.The survey of 512 students at the MIT School of Engineering broadly confirms the model. Personality traits have a strong impact on the attitude towards self-employment. The entrepreneurial attitude is strongly linked with the intention to start a new venture. The students' personality therefore shows an indirect effect on intentions. Furthermore, the entrepreneurial intent is directly affected by perceived barriers and support factors in the entrepreneurship-related context. The findings have important implications for policy makers inside and outside universities.

In a study of innovations developed by mountain bikers, we find that userinnovators almost always utilize "local" information -information already in their possession or generated by themselves -both to determine the need for and to develop the solutions for their innovations. We argue that this finding fits the economic incentives operating on users. Local need information will in general be the most relevant to user-innovators, since the bulk of their innovation-related rewards typically come from in-house use. User-innovators will increasingly tend to rely on local solution information as the stickiness of non-local solution information rises.

We report on a survey of the innovation activities and characteristics of 153 users of outdoor-related consumer products. We find a high level of innovation by these consumers. Thirty-seven percent report that they have developed ideas for new or improved products, and more than 9% report building product prototypes or even marketable products. We also find that innovating users can be reliably distinguished from non-innovating ones by characteristics such as the benefit they expect from using their innovations and the level of expertise they have in their sport.Taken together, these two findings -frequent innovation by consumers and the possibility to identify efficiently those who innovate -imply that innovation by users can be an important source of new product ideas for consumer goods companies. Effective utilization of this resource will require significant changes in idea generation methodologies for many consumer good firms.

In order to reduce the risks of failure usually associated with NPD, leading companies such as 3M, HILTI, or Johnson&Johnson are increasingly working with so‐called Lead Users. Their identification and involvement is supported by the Lead User method – a multi stage approach aiming to generate innovative new product concepts and to enhance the effectiveness of cross‐functional innovation teams. While the Lead User method is frequently cited in the literature, yet, there are only limited attempts to comprehensively discuss how this approach is embedded in theories and empirical findings of innovation and marketing research. Therefore the Lead User method is in the focus of the present paper, both with respect to its theoretical foundation and its implementation into the innovation management system. First, empirical research on user innovations is reviewed to clarify the theoretical foundation of the Lead User method. Second the attention is drawn to the Lead User practice by discussing the various process steps of this specific approach on the basis of two applications of the method. Based on this discussion, we outline open questions related with the practical implementation of the Lead User method in order to start an agenda for future research.