Key success factors and strengths in future products

Strengths and key success factors are important concepts in the strategy area. However, their importance and utility have been accompanied and restricted by a lack of quantitative empirical evidence regarding the following propositions: 1. Different contexts require different critical success factors; 2. In each context, firms whose strengths match the key. success factors will outperform their competition. To test these propositions in quantitative terms was the basic purpose of this study. The study also built and tested a model for identifying the key success factors in any area of mature industrial products. For this purpose, a typology of industrial products was first developed whose dimensions were the type of technology used and the task environment characteristics faced by the organization. With the typology constructed, industries were selected and assigned to several of its cells. A list of organization attributes (for example, image, distribution, service) was then culled from the literature. The propositions framed above were then tested. The conclusion reached by the study was that, although a few exceptions do exist, overall, the empirical evidence does in fact support the study's hypothesis. For academicians and practitioners, the implications of this conclusion are fourfold: 1. The importance that managers focus their activities on the key success factors required by the organization's context, that is, that they concentrate their efforts on executing a few tasks exceedingly well, instead of a large number of tasks only reasonably well. 2. The importance that organizations specialize, that they do not extend their activities into too broad a domain. 3. A model to discover the key success factors for any industry of industrial goods. 4. A typology which possesses both convergent and discriminant validity and therefore can be used in future research on industrial products. Finally, it is important to note that the methodology used in this research can be applied to studies on other types of products, such as consumer goods and services. The replicability of the methodology constitutes an invitation for follow-up research