Market-driving innovation: development of 'breakthroughs' without direct customer input

Although breakthrough innovations are critical to business success, the processes underpinning such market-driving innovation remains illusive. Accordingly, most research on the new-product development (NPD) process, particularly the dominant ‘stage-gate’ innovation process, focuses on maintaining ‘the status quo’ by solving customers’ existing problems in current markets (Jaworski, Kohli, Sahay 2000; Wind and Mahajan 1997). For breakthrough NPD projects, customer input plays a less important role. This is because customers notoriously have difficulties to articulate their future needs (O’Connor 1998). The intent of this study is to develop new theoretical insights into the process of market-driving innovation by answering the following question: how firms develop successful breakthrough innovations while ostensibly ignoring direct customer input? This research will be carried out using multiple case studies across five different industry contexts. It is expected that the results will provide a better understanding of market-driving innovation.