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Innovation and Industrial Product Life Cycles
De Kluyver, Cornelis A.
20/1  (Fall 1977): 21-33

The article focuses on innovation and industrial product life cycles (PLC). The PLC concept has become a widely debated topic in business literature. It is usually advanced in the context of new product planning as an aid to strategy formulation. The formulation of such strategy proposals creates the need for the measurement of PLC. It is surprising, therefore, that despite the many articles on the subject, relatively few quantitative studies of PLC have been reported, given the wide agreement that this concept holds a large potential as a marketing model. The PLC concept describes the evolution of a product over time, as measured by its sales or percent saturation. Each stage in the cycle is a particular stage in the market acceptance of the product, and the term cycle of acceptance has been advanced as a substitute for life cycle. The principle generally thought to underlie the PLC concept is that of diffusion. Knowledge about a new product offering diffuses over time in an exponential fashion, thus creating the steep growth patterns in sales found for many new products.

 

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