Innovation is the buzzword of the moment. Everyone is chasing after that elusive target. If you are like me, you may have a hard time describing what it might be. I think many of us have simply decided that "we'll know it when we see it."
We do like to hold up companies like Apple and 3M as paragons of innovation. They surely are. Yet, their success may not be due to the fact that they have innovative products. There are, in fact, many companies who have innovative products. Some of them are actually quite well known. Unfortunately for these companies, what is not as well known is why you might need to purchase or use their inventions.
This article from Quartz titled "The Simple Reason Products Fail: Customers Don't Understand What They Do" attempts to explain. Here are the opening paragraphs:
The Holy Grail for innovators often is not simply to win in an existing market, but also to create an entirely new product category. But doing so raises a critical question for the entrepreneur: How do you get potential customers and investors to understand what it is you are doing?
It’s harder than it sounds. Consumers make sense of unfamiliar products by mapping them onto categories of things they already understand. So when Apple comes out with its iPhone 6, for example, it’s pretty easy for customers to understand that it’s a lot like the previous iterations. But genuinely novel products don’t fit neatly into one category or another. Indeed, their novelty stems from the very fact that the ideas and technologies that came together to create the new concept existed previously in domains or categories that were thought to be entirely distinct.
The article goes on to discuss Samsung's attempt to market their upcoming phablets (the giant phones that also have characteristics of small tablet devices). Samsung seems to have had some success in creating this new market. The article compares that success to a high-profile launch that was not nearly so successful. 
Why did one fail where one seems to be succeeding? According to the article:
Much of the reason for this is that it has been hard for consumers to make sense of what exactly a Segway is. This challenge is immediately apparent on the company webpage where they describe their device as “a leader in personal, green transportation,” and “as a leader in the emerging small electric vehicle (SeV) space.” This seems a bit like claiming to be a leader in a category with no followers.
One tactic innovators and marketers often use to help potential consumers understand the value of their new innovation is the analogy. In other words, they try to explain the new product by helping the customer map it to an existing product or set of products they already clearly understand. In Segway’s case, Kamen tried to convey the promise of the product through analogy by claiming in 2001 that it would do for city dwellers what “Henry Ford did in the last century for rural America.”....
But these analogies fell flat. Yes, it is clear he believed the product would make walking a distance obsolete. But what exactly is the device? In the end, consumers simply could not comprehend the characteristics that made this the radical innovation it was. Put more simply: they didn’t “get” it.
There are more examples at this full link to the article: http://qz.com/132070/the-simple-reason-products-fail-consumers-dont-understand-what-they-do/
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