The Innovator's Manifesto by Michael Raynor

Author:Michael Raynor [Raynor, Michael E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53167-2
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

It is the movement of a product through these different segments of a market that drives its passage through the various stages of its life cycle. When a product is first introduced, a small number of highly innovative consumers buy it. This is the birth phase. These innovative consumers are not infrequently trendsetters, so the product “catches on” and invades successive segments of the market. As the more populous Early Majority and Late Majority segments enter the market, the product passes through the growth phase, with large numbers of customers jumping on the bandwagon. When the Laggards finally adopt the product, the market for the innovation is saturated and the product is mature. At best, one can hope that the product enters a steady state of low to no growth. More frequently, a product then shifts to its decline phase, as consumers lose interest or a new product with superior performance displaces it.

The product life cycle is a powerful descriptive framework. And when dealing with relatively static customer preferences and product attributes, it can have impressive predictive accuracy. For example, the seminal studies in diffusion looked at the adoption of new farming practices (seed varieties, tools and implements, cultivation techniques). Elaboration of these early studies, such as the 1943 investigations into the adoption of new seed types by Iowa corn farmers, focused on generalizing those findings to other locales, such as Colombia and Bangladesh. These investigations demonstrated that even in the absence of mass media and highly literate consumers, the underlying sigmoidal adoption pattern held. Further, it proved possible to predict which customers (farmers) would adopt the new product (corn seed) based on their relative level of innovativeness.

There is, however, a critical limitation to the product life cycle’s predictive power. The objective, recall, is to specify (within reason) when a product will pass from the promise portended by the embrace of the Early Adopter segment to the path to glory that acceptance by the Early Majority represents. For although the sigmoidal growth curve has a characteristic shape, it can take a very nearly infinite number of different specific forms depending on whether and how quickly the product makes the leap from one customer segment to the next. There is a big difference between spending a year in the birth phase and spending a decade. It matters a great deal whether the growth phase will last two years or ten and whether the maturity phase offers a warm glow of gradual senescence or the marketplace equivalent of slamming into a brick wall at sixty miles per hour. And there is little in the product life cycle framework to help us understand those parameters.

Much of the problem stems from an issue that was raised in the prologue: the grounds for generalizing findings beyond the sample. The markets and products upon which diffusion-based models are built tend to be essentially static. For example, the corn seed in the early studies did not change during the fifteen years that market data were collected, and neither did the farmers’ functional requirements.

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