ABSTRACT
The development and marketing of innovations are known to be highly demanding tasks (Chiesa and Frattini 2011). Overcoming the technological challenges in the research and development phase does not in itself deliver an innovation. For an invention to become an innovation, it has to be commercially successful (Schumpeter 1934), which presumes both a successful launch and diffusion into the market. Commercialization typically brings critical new challenges to innovator œrms (Easingwood and Koustelos 2000), and existing research shows that many companies and products tend to fail in this phase (Di Benedetto 1999, Chiesa and Frattini 2011). Investment in the innovation may be considerable by that time, and the risk of rejection is still very high. Commercialization challenges originate from the novelty of innovations that makes customers and other actors in the business environment resist them (Chiesa and Frattini 2011). Nevertheless, successful diffusion requires adoption among users, complementors, and intermediaries; the new product easily fails if it does not attract support from the adoption networks (Chiesa and Frattini 2011). This makes the manner in which the commercialization is handled as important and emphasizes the critical role of creating and establishing the networks for commercialization.
