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• It is not possible to observe all the would-be second entrants that are never able to develop viable new products that achieve the required threshold and those that abandon all efforts and never try to develop a superior offering. It is also not possible to observe firms that disappear from the market because development is unsuccessful. Successful late entry is far more difficult than it appears.
• Markets evolve with advancing technology, improving productivity, accelerating rates of innovation, increasing knowledge, new capabilities, and ever-better communications. Each successful new entrant exploits this evolution to achieve higher levels of consumer satisfaction than the last entrant. Consequently, almost by definition, the required threshold for success steadily increases. It becomes increasingly more difficult to surpass the previous entrant because each entrant raises the threshold for success. If the threshold for success is always increasing, delay can be deadly. A lack of urgency might result in falling far short of the required threshold for a viable entry.
• The choice a firm faces is not between early entry and a more profitable later entry but rather between allocating more or fewer resources to new product development efforts. Delaying resource allocation might increase the likelihood of facing formidable later entrants. Olympic athletes do not decide to finish second. Being the first entrant is not the decision itself but rather a possible outcome of trying to be first. The second entrant may have expended more resources than the first entrant.
• Each organization might have different innovative expertise in different areas, thus giving them different outcomes for the same project. Some might be better pioneers, and some might be better late entrants. Moreover, a great pioneer might be an incompetent late entrant.
• Market research is more difficult for early entrants because potential buyers are unable to envision very new concepts, and it is difficult to forecast many other variables (e.g., production costs, advertising effectiveness, distribution). Failures rates might be misleading because later entrants, which enjoy better predictions, might be less likely to make launching mistakes, making late launches look less risky. A complacent organization can easily find itself in the position of having only obsolete products and insufficient new products in the pipeline to survive. The organization quietly disappears without influencing failure rates.
• Given many mature markets with unobserved failures (i.e., projects never consummated with observed entry), the rate of return for late entry might be less than that for early entry, despite many observed early failures or a lack of an enduring advantage for early entrants, because aborted attempts to launch a better product are not observed.
• Early entrants enjoy a monopoly period when they face less competition than late entrants.

Biography
Steven M. Shugan is Russell Berrie Foundation Eminent Scholar and a professor at the University of Florida. He teaches multivariate statistics, marketing models, and advanced marketing management. His PhD in Managerial Economics is from Northwestern University. Formerly a full professor at University of Chicago (for 13 years), an assistant professor at the University of Rochester (for 2 years), and an instructor at SDA Bocconi, Milano, he has taught marketing, econometrics (University of Chicago), statistics (University of Florida), and computer science (Northwestern University). He was editor in chief of Marketing Science (for 6 years), editor of Journal of Business, and associate editor of Management Science and has served on many editorial boards, including Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Research. He has numerous publications and presentations in more than 22 countries, has won several best-paper awards (at Marketing Science [twice], Journal of Marketing[twice], and Journal of Retailing [twice]), and was a finalist for awards at Journal of Service Research at Journal of Marketing Research. He has also won various best-teaching awards. He has consulted for more than 20 different firms (for more information, see http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/shugan/).

J Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 2, April 2009
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