Marketing Plans for Technological Innovation Centers: 05 Success Cases

Abstract

Marketing theory since developed by Prof. Jerome McCArthy (1960) fixing the 4Ps mode and later systemized by Prof. Philip Kotler (1962), has been studied and applied almost by default in private companies and particularly in mass consumer products. The functionality and application of marketing theory to technological innovation processes have several publications, articles and contributions based on specific experiences and field cases in different parts of the world, but we realize that we are still far from a structured body of knowledge and universally applicable methodologies.

In Perú, the first Technological Innovation Centers (CITEs in Spanish) was created in 1988, focused in supporting leather and footwear sub-sector; now in 2025, there exists 45 CITEs, installed all over the country serving variety of production chains, including agroindustry, fishing and aquaculture, leather and footwear, forestry timber, camelid textiles, and others.

Part of the strategy for creating CITEs is their articulation with specific production chains to improve its competitiviness, which is why most of them are CITEs that promote hard technologies, industrial processing or transformation technologies.

However, the very nature of their condition and their actions means that these organisations have a strong bias towards the product rather than the market, towards supply rather than demand, which opens up an important space for marketing, with the necessary adaptations to reflect the complexity of technological innovation, to contribute.

The biggest challenge of this proposal is the adaptation of the theoretical frameworks of marketing whose universal reference are brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Xerox, Burger King, Starbucks (B2C approaches) to the market of technological innovation processes (B2B).