Monetizing Innovation

Monetizing Innovation diagnoses why most new products fail commercially: companies design first and price last, praying the market agrees. The Simon-Kucher prescription inverts it — have the willingness-to-pay conversation WITH customers at the design stage, segment by what people will pay for (needs-based, not demographic), configure and bundle features around those segments, choose the monetization model (subscription, usage, freemium, dynamic) as deliberately as the price point, and write the answers into a living pricing strategy. Products built this way launch knowing their revenue physics.

The four failure types — feature shocks (overloaded products nobody can value), minivations (right product, underpriced nerve), hidden gems (game-changers the company can't see), and undeads (products that should never have shipped); the 72% failure statistic; 'the price you can charge IS market feedback'; and the rule that monetization model choice often matters more than price level.

It is the missing pricing chapter of the lean canon — Ries tests desirability, this book tests PAYABILITY, and the two questions are not the same. For SaaS it pairs directly with Campbell's value-metric research. The cultural shift it demands is the hard part: making 'what will this cost and who pays' a design-stage question requires product, finance, and marketing in one room a year earlier than usual.

Distilled from Simon-Kucher & Partners' decades of pricing engagements — the firm Hermann Simon built into the world's largest pricing consultancy — and its global study finding 72% of new products miss revenue targets. Wiley published it May 2016.

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