| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 96 === In Web 2.0 era, the users participate in the forming of information like Blogging, and contribute users’ personal specific knowledge and, furthermore, decide the knowledge structure such as the Wikipedia context. The objective of this paper is to look for the lead users that had been articulated by von Hippel (1988) in the innovative Internet businesses and to evaluate the effectiveness of the toolkits that had been articulated by von Hippel (2001) and used for innovation facilitators. The current Internet context has been evolved into the web 2.0 with both highly simultaneous interactions between users and great amount of contents generated spontaneously by worldly wide-dispersed users. Due to the high interactivity of web 2.0, the website operator can provide some user-friendly toolkits to let users configure their information and demanded applications by themselves. As the von Hippel argued, the lead users were the most effective and valuable innovators to the manufacturers or their upper stream providers than others. We choose an indicator of lead user, that is, the popularity in the hit parade of website, to observe the Internet innovativeness of the lead user candidates and to survey their usage of website’s add-on toolkits. This research conducts a case interview and an interview of web-based questionnaire and thus finds that those who list in the higher rank of hit parade mostly have the characteristics of lead users because they are usually earlier users of website’s newly released functions and thus gaining more perceived benefits than others. In addition, they are more likely to use the website toolkits, especially, such as the trial-and-error learning tools, the modular libraries and the solutions space, so as to customize their personal uses, to response problems posted by others, and even to share self-invented solutions and whatever they had self-configured. The user's incremental innovations have value for manufacturer among them. This study also finds that the website employees who usually involve their own operations and personal use into the website context, that is, the corporate product, will have higher lead-user characteristics than the users in the higher rank of website’s hit parade. So the lead users don’t be looked for outwards. The research findings will give some hints to the providers of Internet business. To construct a user-generated-content web environment with toolkits and innovation incentives, and to encourage intimate use of corporate innovation internally may be the useful approaches to search innovative lead users on the Internet.
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