Ed Nijssen

Ed Nijssen is a Professor of Technology Marketing at the Innovation, Technology Entrepreneurship and Marketing (ITEM) group of the School of Industrial Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His areas of expertise include strategic sales and marketing and entrepreneurial marketing for radical and incremental innovations. 

His research interest focuses on marketing and innovation (e.g., adoption of new products, NPD tools, self-service technologies, social media, marketing/sales—R&D interface, branding), sales research (e.g., sales organization, selling new products, value/solution selling), service research (e.g., innovation in the front line, brand advocacy) and marketing strategy. Recently work focuses, in particular, on servitization (i.e. developing, manufacturing and selling of solutions). Servitization requires integrating hard and software but also a fundamental change in organizational culture to reap benefits from this approach.

As Peter Drucker said: “The purpose of a business [or entrepreneur] is to create customers.”  So, if you want to find out whether your new technology or application holds potential get out there and look for customers! However, if even venturous customers are not interested, you probably should think again. And, please note that in contrast to what designers often think: users and customers are often not the same!