The Impact of Product Innovativeness on Performance

While many writers and strategists maintain that innovation is important, research has often demonstrated that product innovativeness does not have a major impact on the rate of success in the marketplace. Elko Kleinschmidt and Robert Cooper demonstrate that the relationship between product innovativeness and commercial success is U‐shaped. That means that both high and low innovativeness products are more likely to be more successful than those in‐between. The authors suggest that past research has not allowed for this non‐linear relationship and that their data show that moderately innovative, middle‐of‐the‐road products are less likely to succeed when measured by a number of performance criteria. They explore a number of implications of these results.