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 Nielsen Company, a leader in providing media measurement and other consumer and marketing information, recently did a study examining over 50 dimensions of new product development. Success among the largest packaged-goods companies varied widely. A key finding: In those companies where management stays away from the day-to-day development activity, much more revenue from new products was generated. Does it follow then, that the best place for “blue-sky” innovators is far away from corporate headquarters?

The second stage of my career was spent in high-tech hardware and software companies, where I learned about supply chains and distribution channels. By this point, globalization was in full swing, and I was witness to a sweeping transition from heavy vertical integration to heavy outsourcing.

I saw how to use infrastructure and component costs to our strategic advantage. One company I worked for, while it was a much smaller entity, drove an entrenched multibillion dollar industry leader to the brink of bankruptcy. It developed a single-minded channel strategy, and then provided liberal margins to resellers, enabled by lower manufacturing costs in Taiwan.

Our competitor was stuck with sales overhead it couldn’t shed fast enough. 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.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, when factories in China build products for global brands, they get “four pennies on the dollar” for a pair of Nike shoes, or maybe $25 dollars from a popular consumer electronics device that sells for $750. They leave “a boatload of money” on the table, according to the secretary-general of the China Industrial Overseas Development and Planning Association.

So China is no longer satisfied with being just the world’s factory—it wants to move to the “top” of the supply chain where margins are fattest. To do that, the country needs it own mega brand names, and intellectual property. Lenovo was purchased from IBM, Volvo was purchased from Ford. But much, much more needs to be done.

And they need to move quickly, as new contract manufacturing aspirants from Mexico, Eastern Europe, and even Vietnam nip at their heels with even lower component costs and wages.