Harnessing Social Media Lead Users for Product Innovation: A Comparative Analysis with E-commerce Buyers Using Large Language Models

Online reviews not only influence consumers’ purchasing decisions but can also serve as valuable inputs for product innovations. This study aims to investigate how social media lead users compared to customers in contributing to product innovation, using generative large language models (LLMs). This research will analyse reviews from YouTube and Amazon, in which LLMs will perform content summarisation, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis to identify different perspectives between these user groups. The expected outcomes include a better understanding of the distinct roles that lead users and e-commerce buyers play in product innovation, along with a low-cost and accessible method for analysing online product reviews. The study contributes by offering new insights into how different types of user feedback can be leveraged for open innovation.