Efficient Identification of Leading-Edge Expertise: Screening vs. Pyramiding

In order to find ideas for leading edge innovations, the lead user method recently gained much interest. A very important step in this method is the identification of lead users. Recently, there is a notable switch towards a technique we term "pyramiding". Instead of selecting the most appropriate users from a large but finite sample ("screening"), the pyramiding technique, a modified version of the snowball sampling method, relies on the fact that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves: For example, good IT professionals tend to know the identity of IT people who are even more skilled than they are. In this article, we empirically compare the efficiency of both methods and identify the factors impacting the efficiency of the pyramiding method. For this we conduct a large scale experiment in which we simulate 292 pyramiding "chains". Findings have implications for managing efficient search for leading-edge expertise