Why Marketers Fail in Product Innovation

In Knowledge@Wharton:

Why Marketers Often Miss the Mark in Product Innovations

Why do most new products fail? According to Clayton Christensen, the author of Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, it’s because companies focus on a product’s features instead of the job the customer wants it do to. In this piece, Knowledge@Wharton reviews the book’s assertions and highlights how they were put to practical use in various industries.

In 2008, Chris Anderson (then the editor of Wired magazine) wrote a provocative article called “The End of Theory.” Anderson insisted that the era of Big Data had rendered the scientific method — developing a hypothetical model first, and then testing it with data — increasingly obsolete. Google and other companies were generating a “data deluge” that could no longer be contained or explained by models, by theory. “With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves,” Anderson wrote. “We can stop looking for models.” ... "