Marketing and Innovation: the Inventor’s Point of View

Abstract

This paper discusses, in terms of marketing, the entire process of bringing new discoveries to market, identifying the problems is facing an inventor today. The aim is to identify how to improve the methods necessary for introduction of innovative products on the market, without disfavoring none of the parties involved: inventors, certification bodies, manufacturers, distributors and consumers. The objective is to investigate the problems of the moment inventors are facing. Studies that are more recent draw attention to the need of changing the way business are nowadays being done. Increasing the speed of information exchange leads to shortening waiting times. Qualitative research method through in-depth interviews was chosen to understand what specific problems are facing inventors from a wide area of activity. Interpretation of 24 in-depth interviews conducted with inventors, representatives of patent offices and engineering academic researchers, is carried out based on content analysis. The research findings, radiographs current issues that appear in the sequence of steps to be followed after the appearance of the idea, its realization in practice, certification, production and commercialization, due to intensification of information exchange and the exponential growth of the number of original inventions. On the basis of these results it can be optimized the entire process of bringing innovations to market by removing identified obstacles and designing of new methods for elevating the socio-economic-political level of the entire human society. The benefit of the work is given by the advanced marketing vision approach of the process since its origin, i.e. from the emergence of the idea and not the application of specific methods of marketing only in the final phase of the commercialization of products. The link between marketing and innovation is thus treated as the basis from which begins the development of every new product.