Lead userness (LU) captures to what extent a user, in a given product domain, is ahead of an important market trend and expects high benefits from innovating. A comprehensive understanding of antecedents and consequences of LU are important to both theory and practice. To lead-user theory, a more comprehensive understanding of antecedents such as intrinsic motivation may contribute to improved knowledge of the underlying motivational mechanisms that explain why some users display LU. Similarly an improved understanding of consequences may help explain why these users provide advice to other consumers or often come up with attractive innovations. To practice, such knowledge may provide insights on how to identify these users at lower cost as well as how to get use of them for developing or promoting new products.

Previous studies have investigated different antecedents and consequences in different product domains. Therefore, there is a need to further investigate the previously studied antecedents and consequences in more domains. This way a more comprehensive understanding of the relative importance of different antecedents and consequences within and across product domains can be gained.  Some antecedent may thus be more domain-specific than other ones.

In the current study we therefore set out to investigate three previously studied antecedents of LU: consumer knowledge, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. In addition we study a fourth antecedent, technology cognizance, which may be of particular importance in the information technology intense domain we study. Further, two previously studied consequences of LU, opinion leadership and opinion seeking, are researched in the present study of the mobile application domain.

Based on a survey study of 156 undergraduate students we report in a series of regression analyses: (1) consumer knowledge to be the only antecedent of LU; (2) opinion leadership and opinion seeking to be consequences of LU, the former being a relatively more important one, and; (3) Our findings to overall correspond highly to findings in researches of other domains ranging from extreme sports such as kite-surfing and sailplaning to the mass market of home kitchen appliances. Implications for research and practice are provided.