Product Champions: Truths, Myths and Management

Before you can channel the energy of champions, you must understand what motivates and what can be expected from them. Champions thrive in many organizations involved in product development, yet a full understanding of their role within these organizations remains elusive. If managers want to utilize the champion as a valuable product development resource, they must understand what champions really do. Much of what we have come to believe about champions comes to us through anecdotes or personal stories as well as empirical research. Through reviewing the growing empirical research on champions, we find that some of what academics and practitioners think about champions isn't true. More importantly, we also find new truths about champions that can improve the productivity of organizations and champions. Champions Defined In preparing this article, we drew from technology management and new product development literature published since 1960. The champion literature is surprisingly limited. We uncovered fewer than 40 articles discussing champions, and in many of them champions were a side interest. In 1986 Fisher and colleagues reported on an RD we found only nine empirical studies focused on champions that were published since that 1986 call. Our objective was not to be exhaustive in our review, but rather to highlight what academics and practitioners really do know about champions, and to identify commonly held perceptions that are not true. Drawing on this literature, we define a champion as an individual who: * Recognizes a new technology or market opportunity as having significant potential; * Adopts the project as his or her own; * Commits personally to the project; * Generates support from other people in the organization; and * Advocates vigorously for the project. The individual's role as champion is informal, and thus will overlap with his/her formal role. The champion's critical contribution is generating needed project support from other people throughout the organization. This prime characteristic helps differentiate the champion from mere team members or managers acting in their roles or higher-level managers responsible for innovation. Writers on innovation have long discussed the champion's role in the success of technological innovations. In his influential 1963 article, Schon identified the phenomenon of organizational inertia and resistance to new ideas and new technology stating, "the new idea either finds a champion or dies" (2, p. 84). In 1991, Frey echoed this sentiment in his personal recollection of being a product champion: "innovations are lost without champions, people who believe in new products and also understand the gritty tasks of actually building them" (3, p. 4). Roberts and colleagues identified the champion role of pushing a new idea as being critical in moving projects through the organization (4, 5). Although we challenge an unqualified view of the champion's power, we find the role remains as critical today as when first identified. Research based on larger samples and quantitative methods reveals that many of the popularly held beliefs about champions are myths, while others are truths. Five Myths about Champions 1. Champions are associated with market successes. This almost universal myth is that a champion has a positive impact on the market success of a new product. Despite the myth, data tying champion behavior to positive market outcomes are conspicuously missing from the empirical literature (6). While it is true that champions often initiate a project, keep resources flowing to it, and prevent its termination, separate empirical studies on different projects, using different methodologies, show champions are just as likely to support market failures as they are successes (6-8). …