Now or Never Revisited: An Analysis of Market Entry Timing for Successive Product Generation

Determining the optimal market entry timing for successive technological innovations is a critical decision for firms. Pioneering studies dealing with this issue have focused one-time sale (e.g., HDTV), and concluded that a new product should be introduced to the market either now or never, or now or at maturity. However, these prior studies do not examine another commonly seen business practice — revenue is generated from continuous services (e.g., Office 365). In this research, we derive the optimal market entry timing under both one-time sale and continuous service, and check whether the prior findings remain valid under today’s diverse market landscape. We find that under one-time sale, the optimal entry timing is not limited to now, maturity, or never; but it can also lie between now and maturity. More interestingly, our results show that the now or never rule holds only under a scenario not considered in the prior studies.