Only 17% of Manufacturers Launched a New Product. Three Questions to Ask If You Want to Be One of Them.
Between 2021 and 2023, only 17.4% of U.S. manufacturing companies introduced a new or improved product. That’s according to the National Science Foundation’s Annual Business Survey, which tracked more than 200,000 manufacturers. Put another way, more than four out of five manufacturers went three full years without bringing anything new to their customers.
That should worry anyone with a growth target. To grow, you need a meaningful chunk of your sales coming from new products. And you can’t get sales from new products if you aren’t shipping any.
To be transparent and somewhat optimistic, this statistic is actually an increase from previous 2 reports: 16.3% in 2019 and 14.3% in 2022. But we want to see the number continue to grow.
If you want to be in the 17%, here are three questions worth asking about your own organization.
How long does it take an idea to get through your system?
Start by looking honestly at your timelines.
When we worked with a food manufacturer, even a project that was a very small change from the current product took a full year to progress through their system. Not because anyone was lazy or the idea was bad. It was the approvals, the handoffs, the waiting for the next review meeting, and the testing queue.
If a small change takes a year, more disruptive ideas take even longer. And the longer an idea sits in the pipeline, the more likely it is to stall out entirely as priorities shift, champions move on, and budgets get reallocated.
Where does your stimulus come from?
Market insights, consumer insights, and trends are excellent sources of stimulus. They should be part of every Create session.
But in our research, they don’t correlate with success. Our best guess at why: your competitors are reading the same trend reports and talking to the same consumers. When everyone starts from the same stimulus, everyone lands on similar ideas.
Market & consumer insights, trends
Valuable stimulus that belongs in every Create session, but your competition is using the same inputs to invent their next product too.
Technology mining
Deliberately searching for technologies, patents, materials, and methods (often from outside your industry) that let you do what competitors can’t. This is what correlates with success.
That’s where real differentiation comes from, and it’s much harder to copy.
Do you have sufficient resources to get the job done?
We love to talk about fixing broken systems. But sometimes the problem isn’t the system. It’s that there isn’t enough fuel to power it.
We ask teams to rate their agreement with this statement on a 0–10 scale (0 = strongly disagree, 10 = strongly agree): We have sufficient resources to get the job done. World-class organizations average a 7. The average response is a 5.7.
Greg’s Innovation ROI research has some great benchmarking data where spending about 5% of revenue on R&D is roughly average, and innovation is getting more expensive over time.
If you want to lead your category with radical inventions, that takes:
- More resources than your competition
- Smarter systems than your competition
Shipping new products isn’t about one breakthrough idea. It’s about a system that moves ideas quickly, feeds them with stimulus your competitors don’t have, and has enough fuel to finish the job. Check all three, and you’ll know where to focus first.
Watch: Systems-Powered Organizations
Learn the two pathways to get started building the systems that turn ideas into launches.
Source: National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Annual Business Survey: Data Year 2023, Table 22, “Product innovating companies, by industry: 2021–23” (NSF 26-321).
MISSION: To change the world by ENABLING INNOVATION by Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day
Resulting in Increased Speed to Market (up to 6X) and Decreased Risk (30 to 80%)
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