Newswise — The USC Marshall School of Business Center for Global Innovation announced today a new study that shows that nations can be ranked on innovativeness based on the time it takes for new products to take off.
The study, co-authored by Professors Gerard J. Tellis and Deepa Chandrasekaran, shows that products take off fastest in Japan and Norway, ahead of the United States and some major European nations such as UK and Germany. Also, some newly developed nations, such as South Korea, rank ahead of developed Mediterranean nations such as Italy.
The study also finds that the time-to-takeoff of new products varies substantially between products considered "fun," such as cell phones, with a distinctly shorter takeoff than those products equated with work, including clothes dryers.
"Time-to-takeoff of new products is a new metric to assess a nation's innovativeness and to design new product launch strategies," said Gerard J. Tellis, Neely Chair of American Enterprise and director of CGI at USC Marshall.
"Managers are facing an intensely competitive market, characterized by increasing globalization, more frequent new 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."
The study's authors have also shown that time-to-takeoff varies along distinct cultural clusters, such as Nordic Europe, Anglo America, Germanic Europe, Latin America, Latin Europe, East Asia, Africa, and South Asia. Latin nations across continents show similar times-to- takeoff. 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. This is especially true for work products, such as dishwashers and coffee makers that are bound by a nation's culture.
Despite these distinct differences, which are partly explained by culture and wealth, says Tellis, time-to-takeoff is shortening over calendar time while differences across nations are decreasing. Fun products, such as cell phones or digital cameras, have universal appeal and may benefit from a sprinkler strategy.
Launching in small, highly innovative nations like 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.
The study is based on 430 product categories, examined over 50 years, across 31 nations. The analysis relies on a parametric hazard model using 12 explanatory variables, and will be published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Marketing Science. Unlike other innovation centers and organizations, the USC Marshall Center for Global Innovation focuses on proven, objective research rather than opinion or survey to identify the factors that make companies, countries, and R&D centers innovative, says Tellis, citing collaboration between marketing researchers of the University of Southern California, University of Minnesota, Imperial College London, and Cambridge University.
About the USC Marshall School of Business Based at the crossroads of the Pacific Rim, in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California, the USC Marshall School of Business trains global leaders to make a difference in the world.
The school annually serves more than 5,700 undergraduate, graduate, professional and executive-education students, in programs at the main campus in Los Angeles, Irvine and North San Diego County. In conjunction with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, USC Marshall operates a Global Executive MBA program in China.
Marshall's many highly ranked programs and centers of excellence include the Leventhal School of Accounting. For more information, go to http://www.marshall.usc.edu
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