When customers design a new product architecture: the software case

We study the case of an innovation designed by two software companies, which combined their software to build a new kind of software platform. Those companies have had to implement this new platform for two customers. We have undertaken a longitudinal study of those two implementation projects to analyse the role of the first customers, who are lead users, in these projects. This leads us to define four kinds of roles to enrich the lead user notion and to describe a new kind of modularisation process.