Early this fall, if tradition holds, Apple will introduce one or more new iPhones—an unveiling that’s among the year’s biggest events in consumer electronics. The smartphone helped make Apple the world’s most valuable company, even though Samsung and other rivals introduce new products much more frequently. That paradox led V. Kumar, a marketing professor at Georgia State University, and his colleagues Amalesh Sharma and Alok Saboo, to wonder: If a company wants to maximize shareholder value, what’s the optimal number of new products to launch in a given time frame? Does it matter whether the launches are spread out or bunched together, and whether a new product is similar to the rest of the company’s current product portfolio?