Understanding Market Potential
All innovations are introduced into a competitive environment, since almost everything we buy can be substituted with an alternative product.
Surprisingly, many innovations are evaluated in a research setting without the competitive environment being taken into consideration. The reasons given are that the competition can be hard to define or that incorporating the competition is too complicated. These barriers are valid, but they can be overcome. There are a number of ways to incorporate the competition, such as exposing consumers to competition, such as exposing consumers to competitive positionings, having consumers evaluate competitors or asking consumers to make choices from a shelf. Another way is to understand the amount of competition in the markets into which the innovations enter and what we call market structure. The focus of this article is to provide a perspective on the influence of market structure on the influence of market structure on the longterm success of innovations. But before we go into detail on market structure, let us examine the other key drivers of innovation performance.
