Success and Failure in Marketing Innovation: Videotape vs Laservision

The area of innovation and new product development is both one of the most important and one of the most uncertain in management decision making. What looked like good ideas on the drawing board often fail in the marketplace for seemingly arbitrary reasons, or simply due to bad luck. Many innovations fail because the relationship between the innovation and the consumer is ignored in the quest for state‐of‐the‐art technology. While innovation will always remain a risky undertaking, the application of consumer behaviour models, such as that proposed by E.M. Rogers, can increase the proportion of successful product launches.