From Experience: The invisible success factors in product innovation

. . . are condemned to repeat it. Twenty-five years of research into why new products succeed, why they fail, and what distinguishes winning businesses, and are we any further ahead? Some pundits say no! Today’s new product project teams and leaders seem to fall into the same traps that their predecessors did back in the 1970s; moreover, there is little evidence that success rates or research and development (R&D) productivity have increased very much. So what’s the problem? Surely after myriad studies into new product performance, almost every product developer should be able to list the 10 or 15 critical success factors that make the difference between winning and losing. This journal, and others, has published numerous such articles over the years . . . so many that anyone introduced to new product management since 1980 should be as familiar with the critical success factors as a school child is with the ABCs. But we still make the same mistakes. The success factors are invisible . . . not found in typical business practices. Recent studies reveal that the art of product development has not improved all that much—that the voice of the customer is still missing, that solid upfront homework is not done, that many products enter the development phase lacking clear definition, and so on [3,9]. Has an entire generation of product developers missed the message? Has management been blind to what ails innovation, and what makes winners? Or maybe we researchers are guilty of missing the boat here—of focusing on the wrong problems, or communicating poorly, or not making the success factors more visible. This article lowers the microscope on the state of product innovation . . . on the fact that product innovation does not happen as well as it should and that the critical success factors are noticeably absent from the typical new product project. The article outlines the reasons why so many companies and senior managements have failed to heed the messages and continue to repeat the same mistakes. And solutions are proposed—no, not another process, and not another market research methodology—but approaches designed to tackle the difficult question of management’s failure to listen and businesses’ failure to embrace the critical success factors.