Innovation Marketing in the 21st Century: A Total-System Approach to Meet Future Challenges

Innovation, simply defined as idea implemented with significant impact, faces unprecedented marketing challenges for the 21st century, resulting directly from the paradigm shifts in human needs and values as well as in the global environment. This paper first introduces the interactive system of key innovation participants, and their common investment perspective for idea implementation, followed by a new model for human needs to explore the participants’ investment values and risks. It proceeds to present a unified application of marketing concepts to innovation process based on the key participants’ needs and values. The paper then discusses the conditions for innovation market entry in an integrated economic-ecological-societal system. It next describes how these conditions have fundamentally changed in the 21
^st
century due to multi-century economic expansion, exponential technological growth, and rapid environmental deterioration. It analyzes the long-term causal effects of these major changes on new market emergence and existing market behavior in the 21st century. Finally, the paper outlines a total-system approach to innovation marketing for the 21
^st
century that aligns the values of all key innovation participants to meet the enormous challenges of the critical, fast-changing yet unknown futures, which requires analysis of the impacts on participants’ values in the integrated economic-ecological-societal system and studies of critically important unknowns in the future through new tools like advanced IT and nescience.