The Voice of the Product: Templates of New Product Emergence

The paper presents a new framework of analyzing the product itself to infer about future market demands. This framework consists of past regularities that were identified to underlie the emergence of successful new products. By identifying templates of innovation an innovator may be able to predict the future product even before the market signals the needs or when the market information is not accessible. If successful in predicting new products by inspecting the product itself, innovation can be supported by the proposed knowledge system (i.e., the self catalytic dynamics of product evolution) which is invariant to market information. When market information is not accessible (typically in case of latent needs, genuinely new products) the product-based information is sufficiently effective to help in predicting future demands. The conclusion is that reflective practitioners should actively listen to the product and its trends as another source for ideation, because there is more relevant information embedded in the internal dynamics of product evolution than previously recognized in marketing practice.