Sopheon’s Bryan Seyfarth discusses a recent SymphonyIRI study about consumer products and the results may surprise you.

Bringing truly innovative products to market—on a consistent basis—has long been a challenge for consumer products companies. A recent SymphonyIRI study found that 90 percent of consumer products launched in 2010 were brand extensions as opposed to truly new brands. Only three percent achieved blockbuster status (year-one sales of over $50 million).

Sometimes innovation is as simple as turning a ketchup bottle upside down. But what about putting bug repellent in clothing or carbonation in milk? It's convergence culture gone wild.

Innovation is all about creating “the new”, but if you hang around innovators long enough you begin to get the feeling that while lots of “new” things are being brought to market, innovators continue to use “old” approaches to do this. Recently, however, Arthur D. Little published a study on The New Face of Innovation designed to reassure us that new innovation approaches were indeed being developed as well.