ABSTRACT
Every innovation satisfied customer needs perfectly, the only marketing and sales activities needed would be creating awareness and ensuring availability. Then, customers would appear automatically on the entrepreneur's doorstep and demand the product. The entrepreneur would only have to ensure product availability to make the sale. Business growth would be instantaneous and success hard to avoid. However, innovations are usually far from perfect and entrepreneurs struggle to interest customers and convince them of the new product's unique customer value. Based on this observation, the value of marketing for any innovation and start-up should be obvious. The contribution of marketing to a start-up's new product development is in creating customers. A customer development team should be appointed to manage this customer development process. It should include, among others, the entrepreneur himself or herself and the person leading the engineering effort.
