this rate dropped to a TEA of 5.9 percent which is below the average of 14.8 percent of all the middle- to low- income countries that participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) study in 2009. In addition, the pressure is also on the speed at which an innovation is diffused. The term “diffusion” refers to the time that passed from initial development to successful commercialisation (Hivner, Hopkins, and Hopkins 2003: 81). In today’s rapidly changing environment, not introducing an innovation to the market in a timely manner may mean that the need the innovation was supposed to address has already changed again.
The term “innovation” can often be confused with words like “creativity”, “invention”, “change” and “entrepreneurship” (Storey and Salaman 2005: 4) – none of which is a true reflection of the term innovation. Creativity entails idea generation and this is an important precursor to innovation (Cumming 1998: 21). The distinction between the two is that creativity is an original idea and innovation is the development of that idea for commercialisation (Von Oetinger 2005: 29). Innovation has to address market needs, and requires entrepreneurship if it is to achieve commercial success. It must be stressed that innovation and entrepreneurship are complementary because innovation is the source of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship allows innovation to flourish and helps to realise its economic value (Zhoa 2005: 25). It is thus important, from an
entrepreneurial point of view therefore necessary to understand the
28 Management Today | January 2012
commercialisation of an innovation. For the purpose of this paper, innovation is defined as: An idea which makes a significant impact rather than mere routine and incidental change, and the development of an idea for commercialisation to meet the demands of a market.
The highly competitive and rapidly changing environment has resulted in the trend towards shorter product life cycles. This puts additional strain on the commercialisation process, as it has become an immense challenge to keep up with the faster pace of commercialisation. To overcome the above-mentioned challenges, knowledge regarding the factors influencing commercialisation, and the commercialisation process is vital (Vercauteren 2009). Previous research indicated that new product success is closely linked to how well activities and steps from idea generation to product commercialisation are performed in the new product development process, as well as the completeness of the process. It is not solely the markets, technology and synergy that influence success, but the people performing the product development and commercialisation activities (steps) as well (Cooper and Kleinschmidt 1986).
Since 1986, as Cooper and Kleinschmidt (1986) point out, “[t] he critical nature of the majority of the activities of the process, combined with the major gaps and deficiencies uncovered, point strongly to the need for a standard activity plan – a new product innovation and commercialisation process model. Such
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