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.

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.

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.