What is an innovative product or service? Over the years researchers have come up different frameworks to distinguish truly innovative products from next-step improvements of existing ideas: technical vs. market-related, evolutionary vs. revolutionary, and sustaining vs. disruptive. Technological innovations involve “knowledge of components, linkages between components, methods, processes, and techniques that go into a product or service”. The key to successful marketing of technologies is the notion of seeing commercialization as a process of “value recognition”. It starts very early in the development stage. There’s always innovation, but the innovators are not necessarily creating value. Innovation in and of itself merely creates “potential value.” Marketing’s role is to recognize that value. Before the product is fully developed, marketing efforts should commence.

Mobilizing and marketing to these market constituents requires a careful analysis of the entire products value chain and business system. Such influences and market power must be assessed at each stage. With new technology you must deliver beyond the existing industry structure to determine how this would fit in with other forces that are shaping the industry. The next step is to align the interest of different market constituents and design a way to share the potential benefits with them. For radical technologies or products, market constituents will of far greater importance. Companies who are too focused on their own product development effort often ignore this critical stage. This book discusses a number of most commonly used and effective approaches to help you increase your likelihood of successfully launching innovative new products and technologies.