1. 1 Summary This thesis intends to answer three questions: First, what is a lead market; second, what constitutes a lead market, and third, how companies can harness lead markets to generate global innovations. Considering the international, cross-border diffu sion of innovations one can observe that a particular technological design such as the facsimile machine, the personal computer or the mobile cellular telephone is often adopted by one country or region much earlier than by other countries which subsequently follow this country, which I will call the lead market. A lead market is...