Research on Innovation: A Review and Agenda for Marketing Science

Abstract:     
Innovation is one of the most important issues in business research today. It has been studied in many independent research traditions. Our understanding and study of innovation can benefit from an integrative review of these research traditions. In so doing, we identify 16 topics relevant to marketing science, which we classify under five research fields:

- Consumer response to innovation, including attempts to measure consumer innovative-ness, models of new product growth, and recent ideas on network externalities
- Organizations and innovation, which are increasingly important as product development becomes more complex and tools more effective but demanding
- Market entry strategies, which includes recent research on technology revolution, exten-sive marketing science research on strategies for entry, and issues of portfolio manage-ment
- Prescriptive techniques for product development processes, which have been transformed through global pressures, increasingly accurate customer input, web-based communica-tion for dispersed and global product design, and new tools for dealing with complexity over time and across product lines
- Defending against market entry and capturing the rewards of innovating, which includes extensive marketing science research on strategies of defense, managing through metrics and rewards to entrants

For each topic, we summarize key concepts and highlight research challenges. For pre-scriptive research topics, we also review current thinking and applications. For descriptive top-ics, we review key findings.

Keywords: Innovation, new products, consumer innovativeness, diffusion models, network externalities, strategic entry, defensive strategy, ideation, rewards to entrants, metrics

Accepted Paper Series