Dr. Sebastian Gurtner joined the Bern University of Applied Sciences in 2016 as a research professor with a focus on healthcare and innovation management. He leads the team strategy and innovation at its School of Business and serves as head of the executive education program Management in Healthcare Organizations. His research focuses on the creation of value with innovation and in this context especially on low-end innovation, social innovation, and resistance against innovation. While his research tackles issues of several industries, the healthcare setting always receives special attention, as the challenges in healthcare are directly linked to the well-being of our society. He has published in a variety of peer-reviewed academic journals, such as the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Long Range Planning, the Journal of Business Research, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Medical Decision Making, and Health Care Management Review.

Dr. Jelena Spanjol is professor and head of the Institute for Innovation Management at the Munich School of Management, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. Prior to joining LMU, she held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Texas A&M University. Her research examines innovation dynamics across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. In her current work she explores how innovation is motivated by and addresses societal challenges. Her research has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Service Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Marketing Letters, Journal of Business Ethics, Health Psychology, and in various book chapters. She currently serves on the Editorial Review Boards of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and Creativity and Innovation Management as well as serving as an Associate Editor for the domain of innovation at the Journal of Business Research.

Dr. Abbie Griffin holds the Royal L. Garff Endowed Chair in Marketing at the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, where she teaches the core MBA intro Marketing Management and Undergrad Capstone Marketing courses. Professor Griffin's research investigates means for measuring and improving the process of new product development. Her research has been published in Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management, among other journals, as well as in the book titled Serial Innovators: How Individuals in Large Organizations Create Breakthrough New Products. Her 1993 article titled “Voice of the Customer” was awarded both the Frank M. Bass Dissertation Paper Award and the John D.C. Little Best Paper Award by INFORMS and has been named the seventh most important article published in Marketing Science in the last 25 years. She was the editor of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, the leading academic journal in the areas of product and technology development from 1998 to 2003, and the Product Development and Management Association named her as a Crawford Fellow in 2009. She was on the Board of Directors of Navistar International, a $13 billion manufacturer of diesel engines and trucks, from 1998 to 2009. Professor Griffin is an avid quilter, hiker, and scuba diver.

I.1 Why Do We Need This Book?

Since the seminal work of the SAPPHO (Rothwell et al., 1974) and NewProd (Cooper, 1979) studies in the 1970s and 1980s, much has been written about how to support and enable innovation and what factors are critical to ensure innovation success. A simple search on Google Books for “innovation success factors” results in over 197,000 hits. Despite these many writings, conclusively benchmarking a reliable set of new product success factors has become more difficult over the past two decades, as the marketplace is increasingly dynamic and global, thus turning previously differentiating success factors into basic competitive norms. In this information age where globalized co-creation and data-rich environments are on our doorstep, simply meeting current needs of existing customers no longer ensures new product market success.

Innovation failure – the flip side of success factors and enablers – while of great interest to firms, has received far less attention. The Google Books “failure” search results in fewer than half the number of hits as the success search. Moreover, our understanding of innovation challenges lacks a coherent typology or framework, which could help firms more systematically overcome them. This relatively less researched side of innovation management persists despite the importance of “failing to succeed” highlighted in management books.

In this introductory chapter, we:

• Organize innovation challenges into three categories (failures, barriers and constraints);
• Indicate why we focus on constraints to innovation and how firms can adapt their innovation processes and organizations to overcome them;
• Briefly review the “standard” innovation process firms follow;
• Outline and define the three different types of innovation constraints – individual, organizational, and market;
• Depict where different types of constraints occur in the new product development (NPD) process, where the constraints must be addressed, and where they ultimately manifest if not appropriately dealt with; and
• Overview the contents of the rest of the chapters.

In summary, the goal of this chapter is twofold: to provide the background information on “standard” NPD processes and constraints firms may run into such that this material need not be repeated in later chapters and to guide readers to the chapter(s) that may provide them the largest benefit, given their firm's current situation.

I.2 Thinking about Innovation Challenges: Failures, Barriers, and Constraints

Challenges to innovation are diverse, with each type requiring a different solution. Overall, however, innovation challenges fall into three major types: barriers, failures, and constraints (Figure I.1). Firms that stick to their standard NPD approach without managing failures, barriers, and constraints appropriately experience unsatisfactory outcomes, including increased development costs, consumer resistance, delayed adoption, and/or even regulatory interventions that entirely prevent market introduction.

Innovation failures are projects with unsatisfactory outcomes or with expectations that are not met somewhere during the NPD process (Figure I.1, top). Failures require iterating the unsatisfactory phase, with appropriate changes – in short, redos. For example, a product prototype that is not manufacturable must be sent back, perhaps as far back as concept development, and redesigned for manufacturability.

Slightly different are innovation barriers, which stop or heavily delay planned NPD processes (Figure I.1, middle). An innovation barrier requires a work-around or detour. Pilot manufacturing facilities that are not available in a timely manner because they are busy producing other products may require using a contract manufacturer as a work-around to keep the project on schedule.

Both failures and barriers are project-specific challenges – flaws in the process as applied (failure) or unavailable resources (barrier) prevents success in this project. Solutions to these challenges are one-time only and must be developed specifically to fix the problem in just this project.

Innovation constraints are a bit different, as they are challenges that apply to an entire set of NPD projects that have contextually different circumstances from “regular” projects. Innovation constraints thus restrict or limit the applicability of the planned, “regular” (i.e. standard) NPD processes in some way. Therefore, overcoming an innovation constraint necessitates a modification or adaptation of the standard innovation approach, as the constraint represents a nonstandard situation or context for innovation efforts (Figure I.1, bottom). However, and what differentiates constraints from failures or barriers, is that firms can put in place an adaptation to their current “regular” process to repeatedly address all projects that suffer from these constraints.

This book focuses on tools and techniques that overcome various types of innovation constraints. If done right, these adaptations can serve as catalysts to improve an organization's innovation efforts.

I.3 The Standard New Product Development Process

To fully understand what a modification entails, we briefly review the standard NPD process. A product development process is a “disciplined and defined set of tasks, steps, and phases that describe the normal means by which a company repetitively converts embryonic ideas into salable products or services” (see O'Connor, 2004; Watson, 2004). Key to this definition is the “repetitive” aspect of the process. To function effectively and repeatedly produce successful new products, the development process standardizes key developmental activities, processes, and structures.

Research and practice alike have long recognized that the development of new products and services should not be left to chance but actively managed. To understand how NPD works best, researchers have studied companies that most successfully manage the process from the idea for a new product up to its market launch. What the findings show – and examples of successful companies such as Procter & Gamble and 3M illustrate – is that one of the most successful ways of managing NPD is some form of cross-functional phased development process, such as the various forms of the basic Stage-Gate™ Process (Cooper, 1990; Cooper and Sommer, 2016). In this approach, the company rigorously defines and monitors NPD projects along a series of stages and gates. While generally staged and gated NPD processes can differ in how they are specifically implemented, one popular version is the Stage-Gate® process.

The “standard” Stage-Gate process consists of six stages and five gates, as shown in Figure I.2. The gates are the points in time when the potential of the project and progress made in a stage is judged by a defined set of evaluators according to a defined set of criteria. For example, at the gate following the stage “business case,” both technical and business experts evaluate the project in terms of technical feasibility and market potential. At each gate, the firm decides whether the project will move on to the next stage, iterate some aspect of development, or be canceled. This allows companies to reduce uncertainty early in the project life cycle, constantly monitor their project portfolio, and allocate resources only to those projects that promise the highest return.

I.4 Understanding Constraints and Their Impact on the Standard Product Development Process

Recognizing, understanding, and addressing contextual constraints impacting the effectiveness of the standard product development process is more challenging than addressing project-specific failures and barriers. An innovation constraint represents two challenges: First, it is a problem that is located outside the NPD process. Second, where the constraint needs to be addressed, and where its negative effects bear out, may be different points in the product development process.

Innovation Constraints: Chronological Disconnect Between Occurrence and Effect

A second challenge with innovation constraints is that they seldom present immediate negative repercussions within the development process. Instead, an innovation constraint in the ideation phase might not fully manifest its adverse effect until much later, for example, in commercialization. If the communication challenges of dispersed teams are not addressed in the discovery phase, demonstrating the business case will suffer. Similarly, if consumer attitudes and tendencies toward resisting new product adoption are not recognized and addressed in the testing and validation stage, launch performance will be diminished.

The chronological differences between constraint occurrence and constraint effect are shown in Figure I.3. When the constraint is not present, the normal activities in the NPD process function as enablers of NPD success (Figure I.3, top). When a constraint is present, the same activity can turn into a disabling activity, leading to lower process effectiveness and negatively affecting the output in subsequent stages (Figure I.3, bottom).

By defining where the constraint occurs and how it impacts the NPD process, a corresponding adaption (or modification) of the affected NPD process activity can be identified. More specifically, a constraint (such as the cultural standards of the targeted emerging market) can turn process activities (such as standard market research) from enabling a successful NPD outcome (by uncovering needs and opportunities) to disabling or preventing it (by leading to misleading conclusions about the target market). The full effect of the constraint might not be evident until the testing or launch phase. However, the adaptation required to address the constraint fully is needed in the discovery phase.

I.5 Mapping the Book: Where to Find Specific Constraints and Corresponding Solutions

Our goal in this book is to provide managers with actionable insights into a select set of innovation constraints and how to best deal with them. To facilitate navigation through the book, we map out the subsequent chapters in Figure I.4, identifying the constraint and where its solution must be applied in the NPD process. Note that this does not indicate where the specific constraint manifests in terms of negative consequences. A full explanation of the adverse impact from the constraints is given in each chapter. Most important, the chapters describe in detail how to adapt the standard NPD process in order to address each identified constraint.

While Figure I.4 provides a road map to the book, we also preface each section with a brief overview of the chapters in that section, for ease of referencing.

Individually arising innovation constraints are imposed by or come to life through individuals who effect new product development (NPD) success. Those individuals can be customers of the new product or service, employees in the company who spend their time developing new products and services, or managers within the firm who make decisions about projects or manage innovation teams. While other types of individuals also may potentially influence new product success (e.g. suppliers and other external stakeholders), internal innovation employees and customers are the most common and account for the largest part of success or failure of new products. This first part of the book focuses on overcoming individual constraints exhibited by innovation managers (Chapter 1), members of product development teams (Chapter 2), and customers (Chapter 3), as illustrated in Figure P1.1.

In the standard innovation process (see the introduction), several gates determine when and how decision makers evaluate an innovation project and decide if it will proceed to the next stage or if it will be terminated. While ideally those decisions are based on rational predetermined decision criteria, in reality decision makers frequently use intuition or rely on personal biases to make decisions, especially in situations with high uncertainty and complexity, as is the case for NPD decisions. In the end, it is the interplay among risk, uncertainty, and decision maker characteristics that influences the decision-making process and leads individuals to select one project over another.

Chapter 1 in this part analyzes the role of uncertainty and creativity in decisions for NPD projects. The chapter considers constraints due to individuals in the firm and their managers who must combine knowledge and resources in new ways to create an innovation. In general, both research and practice agree that successful NPD needs highly creative and committed individuals as well as facilitation. Research highlights that individual innovative behavior in the workplace is determined by individual characteristics, exchange with and support from supervisors, and organizational commitment. It is the task of the organization to make sure that the creative potential of its employees is realized and that no constraints hinder the birth and growth of innovative projects.

Communication and knowledge-sharing boundaries are critical constraints that can prevent NPD teams from working creatively and efficiently. Chapter 2 tackles these constraints, specifically focusing on NPD teams that consist of individuals with different backgrounds and expertise. Based on a systematization of knowledge-sharing boundaries, the authors present a five-stage solution on how to make knowledge sharing work, despite the interdisciplinarity and heterogeneity of individuals on NPD teams.

Arguably the most crucial group that directly affects NPD success is customers, because they ultimately choose to adopt or reject an innovation. Customer constraints at the individual level differ from constraints in the market in aggregate, which are dealt with in Part 3 of this book. Chapter 3 builds on research that has found that, for individual customers, usage intensity of the product category, income, individual innovativeness, and susceptibility to normative influence determines whether an individual tries a new product or not. It is not people's demographics or position in society that drives their intention to adopt a new product or service as much as their psychographics, or values and attitudes, such as product involvement, individual innovativeness, and opinion leadership. Not all potential customers are created equal; it is their individual differences that can constrain the success of new products and services. Chapter 3 thus takes a deep dive into the personality of customers and depicts identity-related, cognitive, and emotional constraints that prevent individuals from adopting new products and services. After explaining the roots of these constraints, the author shows how to identify them and provides ideas about strategies that help to overcome those trait-based constraints.