Identification of innovative users for new service development in tourism Rita Faullant, Ines Krajger and Markus Zanker 1 Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria {firstname.secondname}@aau.at Abstract The integration of customers into the development process of new products and services is crucial for companies regardless of the industry in which they operate. The advent of the Internet and new media applications has transformed the value creation processes of the tourism industry to an extent unseen in other industry sectors. Electronic information mediators, such as information and booking portals of DMOs (destination management organisations) are not only becoming an increasingly dominant source of information and opinions for tourists but also for tourism service providers. The latter motivates our work to identify the innovative users from all visitors of an electronic information platform. In this paper we will therefore present findings from a research project, where we identified innovative users based on lead user characteristics as well as by a virtual idea contest. The paper’s findings are controversial with respect to mainstream innovation research as they indicate that scales used in traditional innovation research disappoint in the tourism context. With our research we contribute to the existing literature in three ways: 1) we explore whether the lead user concept can also be applied for new service development in spa tourism; 2) we investigate the innovative potential of the identified lead users by assessing their creativity through an idea contest; and 3) thereby evaluate whether lead users in spa tourism are really able to substantially contribute to new service development. Keywords: Open innovation, lead user identification, virtual idea generation, new service development, classification. 1 Introduction For most services in general, and for most tourism offers in particular, the customer traditionally entails a critical and integral role. The service itself is seen as highly dependent upon the interaction quality between service provider and customer (Bolton and Drew 1991; Grönroos 1993; Parasuraman et al. 1988). Despite the acknowledgement of the customers’ central role for tourism offers, it is surprising that customers are rarely integrated into new service development for tourism offers. In sharp contrast, customer integration into new product development has been established on a systematic basis already in the early 1980s for physical goods (Urban and von Hippel 1988; von Hippel 1978). In particular, the most demanding and advanced customers, so called lead users (von Hippel 1986), have been tried to be filtered out and integrated into new product development. Several studies suggest that the integration of users into new product development is an appropriate means for 1 Corresponding author Preprint of: Faullant, R., Krajger, I., Zanker, M.: Identification of innovative users for new service development in tourism. 19th Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism (ENTER), Springer, Helsingborg, Sweden, 2012.