You've heard the stat in every innovation deck: "95% of new products fail." It's dramatic, it's repeated everywhere — and it doesn't survive scrutiny. Empirical studies since 1977 put the genuine new-product hard-failure rate at around 40% or less. The 80–95% figures are, in the words of the researchers who traced them, an "appeal-to-popularity" myth kept alive by people with an interest in it sounding scary.
The correction matters, and it's where Module 7 begins. The source is Castellion and Markham's careful review in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (2013), which followed the 95% claim back to its origins and found no evidence for it. But here's the sharper truth the module then hands you — and it should worry a marketer more than the myth ever did: even at a ~40% hard-failure rate, the majority of launches never deliver meaningful, sustained share. They don't crash. They just never matter. That is the real innovation problem, and it's a strategy problem, not a luck problem.
Most launches don't fail loudly. They succeed quietly into irrelevance — shipped, launched, forgotten, never winning the share that justified the spend.
This is Module 7 of the programme
Innovation Strategy is one of four modules you can take on its own — or start with Module 1, free.
If launches fail on strategy rather than chance, the fix is to treat innovation as a managed pipeline with deliberate roles — not a series of hopeful one-off bets. The module's primary case maps exactly this: Schweppes' innovation pipeline, plotted on vectors — where each initiative is positioned by the kind of growth it's meant to deliver, from close-in extensions that defend and refresh the core, to further-out moves that open genuinely new territory. Seen as a portfolio, you can ask the questions that separate strategic innovation from activity: Which of these defends the core? Which recruits new buyers? Which is a genuine new-territory bet — and have we resourced it like one?
That framing also enforces a discipline from Module 1: innovation has to grow the business profitably. An innovation that cannibalises the core, or drains margin to chase novelty, fails the test even if it "launches successfully." A pipeline view makes that visible before you spend.
Forget whether your next launch will "fail." Ask the more useful question the module trains you to ask: what job is this innovation doing in the portfolio, and how will we know within a year whether it won meaningful share? If you can't answer that before launch, you don't have an innovation strategy — you have a hope, dressed up with a scary statistic.
Innovate with a strategy behind it
Module 7, Innovation Strategy, is available on its own (US$249) or in the full CPD UK Accredited certification.
Sources drawn from Module 7 of the Certified Strategic Marketer®: Castellion, G. & Markham, S.K. (2013), "New Product Failure Rates," Journal of Product Innovation Management, 30(5): 976–979; Schweppes innovation-pipeline case as taught in the module.
