The Voice of the Product: Templates of New Product Emergence Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky The paper presents a new framework of analyzing the product itself to infer about future market demands. This framework consists of past regularities that were identified to underlie the emergence of successful new products. By identifying templates of innovation an innovator may be able to predict the future product even before the market signals the needs or when the market information is not accessible. If successful in predicting new products by inspecting the product itself, innovation can be supported by the proposed knowledge system (i.e., the self catalytic dynamics of product evolution) which is invariant to market information. When market information is not accessible (typically in case of latent needs, genuinely new products) the product-based information is sufficiently effective to help in predicting future demands. The conclusion is that reflective practitioners should actively listen to the product and its trends as another source for ideation, because there is more relevant information embedded in the internal dynamics of product evolution than previously recognized in marketing practice. Keywords: Creativity, ideation, templates, new product development. Introduction: Regularities in New Product Emergence C onsiderable research in marketing sug- gests that marketing forces drive the evolution of new products and services. Market driven new product ideas are often in- ferred from market needs and many product ideas emerge from asking customers to describe their problems with current products. This suggests that market-based information should be considered early in the stage of new product ideation. Furthermore, the con- centration on market demands has led to the formation of methods devised to predict the success of new product innovations and performance measures such as sales and market share. The market, according to this view, impacts the product in many ways in- cluding development, rate of innovation, etc. Recently, Goldenberg, Mazursky, and Solomon (1999 a) questioned whether new products should evolve solely on the basis of knowledge derived from market-based infor- mation, or whether there is an intrinsic product-based scheme stimulating development of products which complements market- based processes. The main thesis advanced in that research was that certain regularities in product-based trends are identifiable, objec- tively verifiable, generalizable across products, and learnable, and that these regularities, can serve as a facilitative tool that channels the ideation process. The idea behind this approach can be conceptualized by viewing the relations be- tween products and their markets as consist- ing of Natural Selection mechanisms: products which fail to fulfill the needs of the customer disappear while products that satisfy con- sumer needs survive until the next change takes place in market demands. According to this axiom markets can be viewed as an environmental pressure, which forces products to constantly evolve. This view of surviving of the fittest is not inconsistent with the prevail- ing approach in which listening to the ``voice of the customer'' (environment inputs) is crucial for inducing changes that ensure success of the product. According to our proposition, years of development yield a considerable amount of Natural selection mechanisms TEMPLATES OF NEW PRODUCT EMERGENCE 157 # Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999. 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Volume 8 Number 3 September 1999