A Marketing Perspective on Innovation: For Disciplinary Perspectives on Innovation
By Jakki J. Mohr, University of Montana, USA, Jakki.Mohr@business.umt.edu
Abstract
This section presents an overview of the marketing perspective on innovation. From a marketing perspective, the role of innovation in an organization is to create a steady stream of new products and services that meets the needs of customers. The role of marketing is to carry the voice of the customer into the organization, in order to infuse decisions with this customer-centric perspective. The marketing discipline offers a number of different lenses through which innovation is studied, including acustomer lens (e.g., factors that affect customers’ decisions to adopt innovation and different categories of adopters; the rate and trajectory of adoption and diffusion of innovations; various research protocols and tools to study customer needs and perceptions of innovation; and the intersection of innovation and consumption from a cultural perspective); acompany lens (e.g., the new product development process, product launch strategies, the interactions between marketing personnel and engineering/R&D personnel in the innovation process, marketing strategy including first-mover advantages, the role of organizational culture and market orientation in innovation and innovation performance, and how various types of innovations require different market strategies);an inter-firm relationship lens (including the role of suppliers, alliance/partners, channel retailers and distributors, and innovation ecosystem partners); and the lens of thebroader market environment (such as government labs, industry consortia, etc.). In addition, this section identifies future opportunity areas where marketing can offer its distinctive perspective on innovation, including, for example, the role of social influencers in adoption of innovation; data-driven innovation; new types of innovation (reverse innovation, sustainable innovation, social innovation, and business model innovation); platform innovations/ innovation ecosystems; and biomimicry.
Disciplinary Perspectives on Innovation
While innovation has emerged as a crucial topic, it remains a phenomenon and not an academic discipline. Just as for the more general theme of entrepreneurship, scholarship draws on a broad spectrum of academic disciplines to shed light on innovation from the particular scholarly discipline. The purpose of this title in Foundations and Trends in Entrepreneurship is to provide a disciplinary perspective on the role of innovation. In particular, this issue offers several distinct disciplinary perspectives including from the academic discipline of finance (“Financing Innovation: Challenges, Opportunities, and Trends” by Davide Hahn, Tommaso Minola, Silvio Vismara and Vincenzo De Stasio), from the entrepreneurship discipline (“Innovation in Schumpeter-Type Firms: Knowledge Collaboration or Knowledge Spillover? by Maksim Belitski), from the management perspective (“Disciplinary Perspectives on Innovation: Management” by James Cunningham et al.) and from the marketing discipline (“A Marketing Perspective on Innovation” by Jakki J. Mohr). Taken together these individual contributions make it clear that the topic of innovation is enriched by drawing on the insights and perspectives of a broad spectrum of scholarly disciplines.
Companion
Foundations and Trends® in Entrepreneurship, Volume 15, Issue 3-4 Special Issue: Disciplinary Perspectives on Innovation
See the other articles that are also part of this special issue.