A Marketing Perspective on Innovation

This section presents an overview of the marketing perspective on innovation. From a marketing perspective, the role of innovation in an organization is to create a steady stream of new products and services that meets the needs of customers. The role of marketing is to carry the voice of the customer into the organization, in order to infuse decisions with this customer-centric perspective. The marketing discipline offers a number of different lenses through which innovation is studied, including a customer lens (e.g., factors that affect customers’ decisions to adopt innovation and different categories of adopters; the rate and trajectory of adoption and diffusion of innovations; various research protocols and tools to study customer needs and perceptions of innovation; and the intersection of innovation and consumption from a cultural perspective); a company lens (e.g., the new product development process, product launch strategies, the interactions between marketing personnel and engineering/R&D personnel in the innovation process, marketing strategy including first-mover advantages, the role of organizational culture and market orientation in innovation and innovation performance, and how various types of innovations require different market strategies); an inter-firm relationship lens (including the role of suppliers, alliance/partners, channel retailers and distributors, and innovation ecosystem partners); and the lens of the broader market environment (such as government labs, industry consortia, etc.). In addition, this section identifies future opportunity where marketing can offer its distinctive perspective on innovation, including, for example, the role of social influencers in adoption of innovation; data-driven innovation; new types of innovation (reverse innovation, sustainable innovation, social innovation, and business model innovation); platform innovations/innovation ecosystems; and biomimicry.