The DNA of Winning Ideas: A Network Perspective of Success in New Product Development

Abstract

The extant literature suggests that the composition of the idea itself may play an important role in explaining its success. However, there is a relative paucity of innovation and marketing research further investigating the nature of the idea. We address this gap with two main contributions. First, we develop a configurational theory about the idea itself (i.e., the “idea DNA”), which suggests that an idea’s compositional features and their configuration may be strong predictors of success. Second, we develop a new network-based methodology that aims to extract the DNA of successful ideas, thereby providing an opportunity to identify further promising ideas in a given domain. We validate this methodology using a dataset from an idea competition in the consumer goods sector. The evidence suggests that an idea’s features and meta- features derived from network analysis can be strong predictors of success.