It is widely recognised that users strongly influence how new technologies get developed. In practice,
however, it is often difficult to reconcile the expectations of technology developers and potential users in
the early stages of innovation. This is one of the reasons why pilot and demonstration (P&D) projects do not
reach their full potential. This paper is based on the findings of a European comparative study, which looked
at different smart energy P&D projects from three different countries (Austria, Denmark, Norway). Three
projects were selected and analysed for this paper, focusing on the role of users in their success. A series of
qualitative interviews were conducted and written docu-ments were reviewed. The analysis shows how a
variety of different user roles contributed to the functioning of the P&D projects. Across all the cases studied, we were able to identify six different user roles and their respective characteristics: Research partners,
traditional or ordinary users, prosumers, user citizens, affiliated users and user innovators. As the different
roles occurred in com-bination with each other, we called the resulting principle sets of user roles. These sets
of user roles were able to inform technical functions, influence the way problems were solved, and support
social and political (de-)stabilisation of the applied technologies.