Should the innovation come from a technical capacity of the company or should it be a response to a demand from the market, from one or more customers? The former is called a “techno-push” and the latter a “market-pull”.  Both can be successful, but each type of innovation has its own risks: products that have no market or are too expensive in one case, demands that cannot be met or are too changeable in the other. The solution lies rather in a constant dialogue between techno-push and market-pull: constantly confronting the company’s technical capabilities with the market’s attention in order to find the successful innovation, the one that will make it possible to create the innovative product or service that the markets and customers will choose and will be ready to pay for at the right price.

Successful innovation enables a company to gain an advantage over its competitors and sometimes to “disrupt” the market to its own advantage, i.e. to change the rules of the game. It requires both an effective internal organisation of the processes leading to innovation and an effective ability to listen to the expectations, expressed or not, of the markets.