The June 9, 2007 issue of The Economist ran an article titled “Lessons from Apple.” After many had left it for dead a decade earlier, the article started, this is the company that now, unequivocally, sets the pace in the consumer electronics industry.

The article highlighted four main development strategies:

First, Apple looks freely outside its walls for new product ideas, an approach referred to as “network innovation.”

Second, Apple orients product design around the needs of its users, rather than technology.

Third, Apple seems particularly gifted at knowing when to ignore market input and go with its gut—Apple was ridiculed when the iPod launched, for example.

And fourth, Apple is able to “fail wisely,” as the authors put it—use mistakes to learn, and then move on.

Robin Hanson suggests that there are at least five reasons to be less creative when it comes to new product development (“The Myth of Creativity,” BusinessWeek, July 3, 2006):

1. Many big ideas and innovations tend to stay around for a long time. Smaller changes to those big ideas will likely benefit industry the most.
2. The big ideas that result from creativity often go unimplemented. Effecting change requires resources. Most businesses just don’t have the resources available to put the new innovation into action, especially given the large risk.
3. Looking back, many of the most useful product innovations are a direct result of a utility problem, not a creative idea.
4. Creativity is often thought to be its own entity that is meant to control the thinker. In business, it’s best to never lose control.
5. Productivity can suffer when product development is guided by creativity in innovation. More time ought to be spent learning what to do with the existing innovative ideas rather than trying to think of more new ones.

Ed. Note: It’s true, that creativity can easily get out of control. But, at the same time, creativity is too important to ignore: it can be a significant source of competitive advantage. Creativity always needs to be grounded in problem solving and creativity for creativity’s sake is always dangerous. The better strategy is to be aware of the pitfalls and prepare well in advance for effective implementation.

I often get asked how products like Facebook do it—grow so fast and so organically. Facebook possesses four messaging attributes that can be difficult to come by individually, let alone in one package:

1. A universally appealing value proposition
2. The network effect (where the value proposition grows even stronger as individuals bring their friends into the fold)
3. A user experience that is second to none (yes, amazing design is a messaging variable)
4. A “price” that is free.

Even still, the growth of sites like Facebook is never 100% viral, because media support is always present—a factor caused, of course, by their rapid growth rates.

Your employees and colleagues have a wealth of experience and lots of ideas. So why aren’t your brainstorming sessions generating the results you want?

According to Michael Myser, there are three simple rules you need to follow to ensure success:

First, brainstorming sessions are structured events that produce valuable results. Define what you want to accomplish ahead of time, and communicate the goals in advance. It is extremely important that participants have time to mentally prepare.

Second, set specific session rules, including time limits and ways to resolve arguments and criticism.

Third, make sure you have a leader. This should be a person that the brainstorming participants feel comfortable (so even far-out ideas are embraced) and willing to keep things on track (Michael Myser, “When Brainstorming Goes Bad,” Business 2.0, October 2006.)

According to a McKinsey & Company study, more than 70% of senior executives said that innovation will be one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies.

Unfortunately, at the same time they also said they were “generally disappointed” in their ability to promote it—but they knew intuitively that any sustainable effort must be grounded by their company’s people and culture.

A few years ago,BusinessWeek recounted how, in a joint survey with the Boston Consulting Group, one thousand senior managers ranked slow development times as the number one obstacle to innovation. Innovation, the publication said, is about selecting and executing the right ideas and bringing them to market in record time (Jena McGregor, “The World’s Most Innovative Companies,” BusinessWeek, April 24, 2006).

A critical success factor is so essential to achieving a desired outcome that if it’s missing, or falls below an acceptable range, your project is destined to fail.

D. Ronald Daniel of McKinsey & Company started the discussion about critical success factors in 1961, and Jack Rockart of MIT gave it renewed and expanded life in 1986. Every aspect of your business has at least some critical success factors. What they are depends on what you’re trying to do and its scope. They can apply to one specific task, or they can apply to your business in its entirety. They can be specific and unique or they can be broad and universal.

Once in place, critical success factors become ideal “filters” for subsequent decision making.

The second stage (out of three) of my career was spent in high-tech hardware and software companies, where learned something about supply-chain and distribution-channel innovation.

By now globalization was in full swing, and I was witness to the transition from heavy vertical integration to heavy outsourcing. I saw how to use infrastructure and component costs to strategic advantage. One company I worked for, while it was a much smaller entity, drove an entrenched multibillion dollar industry leader into bankruptcy. It developed a single-minded channel strategy, fueled by lower prices enabled by lower manufacturing costs in Taiwan.

Our competitor was stuck with direct-sales overhead it just couldn’t shed fast enough, and the numbers caught up with it. It was an eye-opener: The unique power of the supply chain in all its glory.

Determining the causes of product success has been the subject of great interest and rigorous study since the beginning of the modern marketing era, starting in the 1950s.

From academia to large companies, from consultants to advertising and public relations agencies, from businesspeople to sociologists, psychiatrists and even neuroscientists, there has been a determined march forward to discover the mysteries of why people buy the products they do.

The guesswork of the distant past has been replaced with high-quality research and well documented field experiments. It may not be physics, but important principles have emerged from this collective effort, validated time and again through decades of application.

New Product Development is now a science.

Years ago, a major U.S. consulting firm, Arthur Andersen, created a database of best practices for business activities. Later on, after this information and experience had seasoned through many years and possibly thousands of implementations, clients asked the firm if there were any fundamental lessons, or principles, that had emerged from the more than thirty-thousand pages of accumulated knowledge.

The response was, yes, there were three things that stood out: the most successful companies constantly search for a better way to do things, they develop deep relationships with stakeholders, and they adopt a strong process view of their businesses.

For simplicity, we distill those practices down to three core words: Proactive, Relationships and Processes.

Shortly after I began collecting background material for my book, I came across a press release from Bain & Company with this headline: “Less Complex Companies Grow Nearly Twice as Fast as Competitors.”

Bain examined the complexity of product and service offerings across a range of companies. Too many choices—product proliferation—were impeding customer action and a sure sign of lack of customer understanding. “Complexity is often a company’s largest hidden liability,” according to Bain’s head of global performance improvement practice.

Less complex companies grew revenue 1.7 times faster than their peers, reduced costs and accelerated customer decisions.

Little on this planet compares to creating a successful new product from scratch. For those involved, it can be the most challenging activity they’ve ever taken on.

It’s also one of the most risky. In Silicon Valley, an incalculable number of entrepreneurs have bet their houses, spouses and futures to have the opportunity for just one good roll of the dice.

We accept this risk because we’re driven by the chance for money and fame, of course, but a surprising number of people I meet are also driven by the chance to change the world. That’s how intertwined products are with our very society. If yours is a blockbuster, you can literally alter the way we live. How’s that for leaving your mark?

Lots of work has been done on the topics of product success and innovation, and what it takes to optimize team output, but no one has pulled all the pieces together into one cohesive process structure designed for the realities of our times—accelerated introductions, fewer resources, non-technical customers.

That’s the purpose of this blog. It provides a forum for discussing those things most important in building, marketing and supporting successful products today. From critical success factors to creative problem-solving, we’ll attempt to capture and archive the best ideas here.

It’s written for anyone with a vested interest in product success, which at last count was just about everyone in business. But in particular, it’s written for technical developers, the ones who are now directly chartered with creating the vast majority of the world’s consumer products (what doesn’t have some technology aspect?).

Thank you for your interest, and if you choose to participate in our discussion, thank you for that as well.