The road to deliver innovation to the marketplace has traditionally been a rocky one. For every successful disruptive innovation, thousands never see the light of day. Many a product manager and executive have been burned by projects that consumed investment dollars but were never released, or if they were, quickly fizzled. The closets of corporations are filled with the proverbial skeletons that sit on shelves for years until someone at last takes them out, dusts them off, and turns them into an innovation, as was the case with 3M Post-it Notes.

What makes some innovations into market dominators while others are relegated to the dustbin of business history? As we stated earlier, an idea becomes an attractive opportunity only when it delivers a solution to customers who place value on it for the problem that it solves. So how do you select an idea that the marketplace ultimately will value? Even more challenging, how do you select an idea about a new technology for a problem of which the market is as yet unaware? (Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation is reported to have said in 1977 "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" ^[4] only a few years before the personal computer radically altered what people were able to do in their homes.)

The success of an innovation lies with the customer, the final judge and jury of the marketplace. Don DeLauder, director of product innovation and...