New industrial financial services: What distinguishes the winners

Robert Cooper and Ulricke de Brentani report the results of their study of firms participating in the industrial financial services industry. Using a self-administered questionnaire, they obtained data on 56 successful and 50 failed products and found that success and failure are strongly associated with eleven important dimensions: synergy, product/market fit, quality of execution of the launch, unique/superior product, quality of execution of marketing activities, market growth and size, service expertise, quality of execution of technical activities, quality of service delivery, quality of execution of pre-development activities, and the presence of tangible elements of the service offering. They report some surprises, including their observation that while new to the firm, products entail more risk than “close to home” ones, the resulting level of success is not sharply reduced.