New Product Success

Cooper's NewProd study identified the dimensions that distinguish industrial new product successes from failures: product uniqueness and superiority, market knowledge and marketing proficiency, and technical and production proficiency. It is the table's first empirical success-factor study and the template for four decades of research asking the same question with better data.

The most restless column in the table: five of its six transitions change strategy block (environment, content, process, inputs, content, process). Only Stakeholders and Sustainability drifts more. Innovation research keeps relocating, which is one reason it is hard to teach as one stream.

Two curated links out, Proactive Market Orientation (latent needs drive new product success) and Exploration-Exploitation (judged by new product outcomes), plus 21 deep-dive mentions in 11 families, eight of them in Learning and Knowledge. It travels as a vocabulary: "new product success" is the outcome variable of half the learning stream.

One curated link in, from the Marketing Concept (Mc): market knowledge and marketing proficiency are the concept applied to development. Cooper (1979) cites no other anchor work on the table, the only cell among the ten that started its lineage from outside it.

Only five anchor works cite it, in three families: the diffusion research agenda (Gatignon and Robertson, 1985), both Pioneer Advantage reassessments (Kerin, Varadarajan, and Peterson, 1992; Golder and Tellis, 1993), new service development (Johne and Storey, 1998), and the success-factor meta-analysis (Henard and Szymanski, 2001). Few citations, long shadow: its sub-lineage asks Cooper's question five times, in 1987, 1994, 2001, and 2012.