Businesses today face increasing pressure to accelerate product time-to-market while reducing costs and deliver more high-quality products to customers. According to a recent study, a nation's ability to embrace those changes is a true indicator of how innovative it has become.

Deepa Chandrasekaran, assistant professor of marketing at Lehigh University, worked alongside Gerard J. Tellis, director of the Center for Global Innovation and professor of marketing at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, to evaluate more than two dozen countries based on the time it takes to introduce new products.

The report, titled The Global Takeoff of New Products: Culture, Wealth, or Vanishing Differences, followed the takeoff of 16 new products in 31 countries, over a 50-year period.

For research purposes, products were broken down into two distinct categories: those for work and those associated with recreational use, or "fun" products. Work products, meaning those that perform necessary tasks associated with standard modern living, included such items as a dishwasher, a microwave oven and a washing machine. Fun products included a cell phone, personal computer and an MP3 player. A combination of newly released and older products was used in the study.

The report's authors selected countries to represent a range of different economies and cultures, the two most influential factors in determining a product's time-to-takeoff in a given country. Among the sample countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Chile, India and Morocco. Twelve variables associated with culture and economy were accounted for, including religiosity (cultural), information access (economic) and hypotheses regarding each variable's particular influence on product time-to-takeoff were drawn.

"What we're learning is that culture plays a significant role in influencing how quickly a country is willing to embrace new products and technology, but it's not an exclusive indicator. Differences in wealth are also a contributing factor. Taken together, we can get a pretty clear snapshot of a nation's innovativeness and its ability to adapt to the changing environment," Tellis said in a statement from Lehigh University.

With such variables in mind, the study aimed to uncover not only which nations were high-performers for innovation, but to provide marketers with data that may assist in how to launch new products globally.

"Managers are facing an intensely competitive market, characterized by increasing globalization, more frequent product launches, and shorter life cycles. In such markets, they need to know which nations are most innovative, where to launch new products, and whether to do so with a sprinkler (simultaneous across nations) or waterfall (stagger across nations) strategy," Tellis stated in a USC announcement.

The study's results found that products launched in Japan and Norway took off fastest, followed by Sweden, The Netherlands and Denmark. The U.S. came in at No. 6 for "innovativeness."

Across the globe, time-to-market is becoming increasingly shorter over the span of a calendar year. Already developed countries tend to rank higher in innovation, with a mean takeoff time of seven years, whereas developing countries rank lower, with a mean takeoff time of 11 years. However, newly developed countries in Asia, such as South Korea, out-performed established European countries, such as Italy. "Fun" products have a faster takeoff rate than work products, with mean takeoff times of seven and 12 years, respectively.

"Launching in small, highly innovative nations (e.g., Sweden) may be especially beneficial because it increases probability of adoption, decreasing waiting time, and lowers scale of launch. In contrast, evidence shows that firms favor launching in large economies of the world such as the U.S., UK, or Germany," according to a statement from USC Marshall regarding the study.

Product takeoff patterns are also consistent across certain cultural and geographical regions, with clusters such as Nordic Europe, Anglo America, Germanic Europe and South Asia all housing countries with markedly similar takeoff times. Globally, Latin countries tend to exhibit similar launch times.

"Given the sharp differences in time-to-takeoff across nations, a waterfall strategy is generally preferable to a sprinkler strategy because it lowers the scale of launch, allows for differential strategy across nations, and allows for learning from launches in prior nations," the USC statement noted.

Although a waterfall strategy appears to be the preferred launch method, there is evidence to support a sprinkler strategy when it comes to "fun" products, which aren't as closely linked to a nation's culture as work products appear to be, and are more likely to have universal appeal.

Similarly, a new Aberdeen Group report, titled The Innovator's Toolbox (registration required), examined more than 280 manufacturers' experiences and intentions when developing new product concepts and yielded similar results.

"Interestingly, getting the right product to market dwarfs concerns about product development cost or budget issues by more than two to one," the report stated. "This tells us that many companies are driven to embrace innovation in an effort to look outward, not inward — for business growth. Indeed, innovation is being viewed as a business driver, and as an effective means of addressing customer needs and market demands."

This isn't to say that innovation is everything. There are, of course, multiple factors that marketers must consider when deciding where and how to launch a product. Timing counts, too.

"Bringing a product to market late, regardless of how well it fits the needs of the marketplace, can significantly impede an organization's ability to capitalize on its innovation investment," last month's Aberdeen Group report notes.

If the results of these studies prove to have significant weight, businesses the world over stand to gain a needed edge in today's downtrodden economy. Every country benefits from advances in innovation, but knowing who's at the top in terms of time-to-market very well could change the way companies approach global product launch.

Resources

The Global Takeoff of New Products: Culture, Wealth, or Vanishing Differences
by Deepa Chandrasekaran and Gerard J. Tellis
Marketing Science, September/October 2008

Japan and Scandinavian Countries Are Most Innovative When It Comes to Launching Products
University of Southern California, Oct. 28, 2008

USC Marshall Center for Global Innovation Reveals How to Create a Winning Corporate Culture to Commercialize Radical Innovations
USC Marshall Center for Global Innovation, Jan. 30, 2009

New Study Identifies World's Most Innovative Nations
Lehigh University / Businesswire, Oct. 27, 2008

The Innovator's Toolbox
by Amy Rowell
Aberdeen Group, January 2009