Misquoted Confidence: medium
Primary source found, but the way it is quoted changes the subject, metric, population or precision.
Safe rephrasing
Clayton Christensen noted that about 30,000 new consumer products launch each year and many fail; the popular 80% or 95% failure rates have no source in his remarks.
What the source says
Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who notes that each year 30,000 new consumer products are launched—and many of them fail.
HBS Working Knowledge — Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (Feb. 14, 2011)
- Commonly cited as
- "95% of new products fail (Harvard's Clayton Christensen)"
- True origin
- HBS Working Knowledge — Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (Feb. 14, 2011)
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- 2011
- Data as of
- 2011 article
- Last checked
- Method & sample
- HBS article summarizing Christensen's jobs-to-be-done talk; it gives no failure percentage or study.
- Drift between quote and source
- The source says 'many of them fail'; the 80% and 95% figures were added later
- No study measures the failure rate
- Interest
- n/a (business school publication).