About

Jonathan Bohlmann is a Professor of Marketing and Innovation and serves as the Department Head at NC State University's Poole College of Management. His research interests focus on innovative new products and strategic decision-making, with recent work in areas such as first-mover advantage, innovation adoption, and internet pricing strategy. He has published in top marketing journals including the Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Marketing Research. Dr. Bohlmann earned his Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has previously served on the faculties of Purdue University and Michigan State University before joining NC State in 2008. Before his academic career, he worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry, managing R&D projects related to advanced aircraft design, materials innovations, and product design optimization. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in aeronautical engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Texas Christian University.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Marketing
• Business
• Industrial organization
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Knowledge management
• Process management

Selected publications

• Incumbent inertia, innovativeness, and performance (dis)advantages: A demand-side learning perspective

  AMS Review · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Industrial organization
  • Business

  Abstract Strategies of incumbent firms have received considerable attention in marketing and across business disciplines, but findings regarding performance (dis)advantages and innovativeness are mixed. Prior studies on supply-side sources (factors internal to the firm) of incumbent inertia disadvantages are more prevalent than those on demand-side factors, which relate to a firm’s customers and may explain potential incumbent advantages. We introduce an integrated demand-side framework to incumbent inertia, recognizing how the supply- and demand-side factors interrelate through learning mechanisms. On the one hand, incumbent firms learn and develop various routines and assets that influence their product strategies, typically reflecting inertia and incremental innovation. At the same time, customers learn about products in the market, forming preferences that reflect switching costs and network externalities (demand-side factors). Although an incumbent can gain advantages from demand-side effects, this could accelerate the onset of supply-side disadvantages. We present a set of research propositions that specify critical effects, and examine implications for incumbent strategies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fueling innovation management research: Future directions and five forward‐looking paths

  Journal of Product Innovation Management · 2024 · 58 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Business
  • Industrial organization

  Abstract Research about innovation management explores how the future is created—who is creating it (organizations, collaborations, etc.), for what aims (customer satisfaction, market performance, etc.), and with what broader effects (social, environmental, etc.). With this extended essay, we explore the potential futures of innovation management research in three ways. First, we briefly review the history of past research agendas and priorities published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), highlighting three broad topic areas (technological, social/environmental, and organizational) that have emerged over time and their potential disruptive implications for innovation management research. Second, we describe the outcome of a gathering of leading scholars in innovation management tasked with the challenge of identifying critical research paths for our field. This collaboration resulted in five “deep dive” essays into areas ripe for innovation management research in the years ahead: liquid innovation, artificial intelligence in innovation, business model innovation, public value innovation, and responsible innovation. Third, we reflect on this expansive effort and offer a discussion of implications (tensions, challenges, and opportunities) for future innovation management scholarship.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Issue Information

  Journal of Product Innovation Management · 2020-11-01

  paratextOpen access

  The Journal of Product Innovation Management is the leading academic journal devoted to the latest research, theory, and practice in innovation and new products (goods, services, and hybrid solutions) development. The scope of the journal is broad, taking account of issues that are crucial to successful innovation in the organization's external and internal environments. The intent is to be informative, thought-provoking and intellectually challenging thereby contributing to the knowledge and practice of new product development and innovation management. It is one of the important benefits of being a PDMA member, although subscriptions are also available directly from the publisher.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pricing Best Sellers and Traffic Generators: The Role of Asymmetric Cross-selling

  Journal of Interactive Marketing · 2017-11-05 · 16 citations

  articleSenior author

  Among the many items online retailers sell, some stand out as best sellers and are often sold at considerable discounts. Best seller discounting can encourage customer traffic and the purchase of a basket of other products in the same transaction. Although most studies treat retailers as symmetric, the cross-selling potential is generally asymmetric across retailers, since some online retailers have more products to sell. In addition, the cross-selling effect works both ways — customers intending to buy a best seller may buy other items in their shopping basket, while other customers intending to buy a basket may buy a best seller while visiting the retailer. The authors model the pricing implications of this rich variety of asymmetric cross-selling, with both best sellers and typical baskets acting as traffic generators and cross-sold products. The common wisdom that loss leader pricing leads to neither a significant increase in store traffic nor an increase in profits does not apply in an asymmetric case where one retailer has more products to cross-sell. The cross-selling potential of products even far down the best seller list is demonstrated. Empirical analyses provide support for key findings of the theoretical model using book pricing and sales rank data from multiple online retailers.

  PublisherDOI

• Customer Experience Mapping: The Springboard to Innovative Solutions

  Design Thinking · 2015-10-07 · 2 citations

  other1st authorCorresponding

  A primary method to understand the total customer experience and integrate it with the new product development (NPD) innovation process is experience mapping. The goal is to create an experience-based springboard for product design and innovation. Experience mapping is part of many design thinking toolboxes, and is directly linked to other methods in the design process such as personas, ideation, and stakeholder value exchange. This chapter discusses the three essential elements of experience mapping: understanding the total customer experience as inputs to the experience map; making the experience map; and utilizing the experience map as a springboard to developing innovative solutions. It describes how the experience map can be effectively utilized to envision and design innovative solutions for users. The chapter presents an example of a patient who requires physical therapy services to demonstrate how experience maps can be effectively utilized to add value and satisfy user needs.

  PublisherDOI

• Enacting Change in Strategic Marketing Decisions: The Role of Regulatory Focus in Teams

  Developments in marketing science: proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2015-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The interplay of innovation, brand, and marketing mix variables in line extensions

  Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2015-04-09 · 44 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Demand-side inertia factors and their benefits for innovativeness

  Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science · 2013-01-31 · 27 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Interplay of Customer and Product Innovation Dynamics: An Exploratory Study

  Journal of Product Innovation Management · 2012-06-12 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The challenges of successfully developing radical or really new products have received considerable attention from a variety of marketing, strategic, and organizational perspectives. Previous research has stressed the importance of a market‐driven customer orientation, the resolution of market and technological uncertainty, and organizational processes such as cross‐functional teams and organizational learning. However, several fundamental issues have not been addressed. From a customer's perspective, a more innovative product tends to have uncertain benefits and requires customers to learn new behaviors. Customer preferences can, therefore, change as product experience and learning increase. From a firm's perspective, it is unclear how to be customer‐oriented under such dynamic preferences, and product strategies using evolving technologies will tend to interact with how customers learn about an innovation. This research focuses on identifying unresolved issues about these customer and product innovation dynamics. A conceptual framework and series of propositions are presented that relate both changing technology and customer learning to a firm's strategic decisions in developing and launching really new products. The framework is based on in‐depth interviews with high‐tech product managers across several sectors, focusing on the business‐to‐business context. The propositions resulting from the framework highlight the need to consider relevant customer dynamics as integral to a firm's product innovation process. Successful innovation strategies and future research challenges are discussed, and applications to better understanding customer needs and theories of disruptive innovation are examined. Several key insights for innovation success hinge on a broad, downstream orientation to customer needs and product innovation dynamics. To be effective innovators, firms must know their customers' customers and competitors as well as or better than their immediate customers do. Market research must extend downstream for a comprehensive understanding of customer needs dynamics. In the context of disruptive innovation, new dimensions of customer needs may become more valuable based on perceived downstream customer trends. Firms may also innovate on secondary needs because mainstream customers do not always give firms the design freedom to radically innovate on primary features. Understanding customer commitments and how they develop under evolving needs can help firms focus resources on innovative efforts more likely to be accepted by customers.

  PublisherDOI

• New Product Team Decision Making: Regulatory Focus Effects on Number, Type, and Timing Decisions^*

  Journal of Product Innovation Management · 2011-04-20 · 60 citations

  articleSenior author

  Company executives rely on new product development teams to carry out their directives and make decisions according to management's goals. However, team members bring their own motivational perspectives to strategic decisions. This research examines how individual and leadership motivations influence a dyadic team's new product decisions. Specifically, this article investigates how matching vs. mismatched motivations between team members affect new product number, type, and timing decisions. In addition, this study asks how effective leadership‐provided motivations are in guiding teams' new product decisions. A set of hypotheses is developed using regulatory focus theory, which identifies basic motivational differences in individuals (i.e., promotion vs. prevention focus) and their effects on decision making. The hypotheses examine the effects of regulatory focus match vs. mismatch within teams on the likelihood to introduce new products, the timing of new product introductions, and the types of new products introduced. To test the hypotheses, a controlled, yet realistic product management simulation is employed. A total of 124 undergraduate seniors (83 women and 41 men) at a large public university enrolled in a marketing management capstone course participated in this study for partial course credit. Utilizing two‐person teams engaged in a business simulation ensured an appropriate level of controlled complexity in the decision making task, while allowing the phenomena of interest to be isolated and tested. Results show that when dyads share the same motivational approach (regulatory focus match), leadership‐prescribed goal pursuit strategies are largely ineffective. Only dyads that do not share the same motivational approach to decision making (regulatory focus mismatch) make new product decisions consistent with leadership‐prescribed goal pursuit strategies. For regulatory focus match dyads, the results demonstrate that a promotion focus (when compared to a prevention focus) leads to greater numbers of new products introduced, faster new product introductions, and more novel new product introductions. For new product managers, these results carry important implications. Which new product opportunities to invest in and which to forgo is presumably determined by the strategic direction given to teams by top management. Results suggest that when team members share the same motivational approach, this not only influences new product decisions, but also diminishes or eliminates the influence top management can exert on new product decisions. Such “isolation” from leadership influences does not have to be detrimental. For example, companies that seek to insulate new product development teams from influences from the top, such as is the case in many new venture incubations, would be well served to staff those teams ensuring a promotion focus match.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• William J. Qualls

  11 shared

• Jelena Spanjol

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

  10 shared

• Terrence A. Weisshaar

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  4 shared

• José Antônio Rosa

  4 shared

• Marcel Bogers

  Eindhoven University of Technology

  3 shared

• Leona Tam

  University of British Columbia

  3 shared

• Cenk Koçaş

  Sabancı Üniversitesi

  3 shared

• Bruce D. Weinberg

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2 shared

Labs

• Marketing and Innovation LabPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  MIT Sloan School of Management

Awards & honors

• Zelnak Management of Innovation Research Award (March 2, 201…