The failure rate of new products has always been high. However, in recent years, a number of nimble upstarts have emerged as fierce competitors to well-established category leaders. Their success has driven many large manufacturers to question whether their resources, scale and processes are weaknesses that should be discarded in favor of a new “agile” playbook emulating these emerging competitors. However, it’s easy to forget that the most prominent new players represent a very small sample, and there are many others who failed to gain traction along the way. This results in “survivor bias” when assessing the performance of small players; because only the surviving brands are tracked, the average performance of small brands is artificially inflated.