Doug Hall, unlike most business consultants, makes quantitative claims in his book Jump Start Your Business Brain. According to his research, he can predict the effect of certain basic marketing techniques on the success of a business. For example, he says that businesses that articulate “an overt benefit, a dramatic difference, and a real reason to believe” have about a 47% chance of success, while having only two of the three gives about a 30% chance of success.

Today I just ran across another interesting set of quantitative data about success factors, from the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Success Factors in New Ventures: A Meta-analysis, by Song, Podoynitsyna, et al. (I believe the link I provided is free, although most issues of this journal are behind a paywall.)

Based on a meta-analysis of a number of other studies about successful and non-successful new ventures, the authors determined that eight factors – out of about 20 candidate factors – were the best predictors of success. The candidate factors included items like:

• A low-cost strategy
• Prior startup experience
• Patent protection

Interestingly, the eight success factors did not include prior startup experience, or what they call “product innovation”. Instead, the factors were:

1. supply chain integration
2. market scope
3. firm age
4. size of founding team
5. financial resources
6. founders’ marketing experience
7. founders’ industry experience
8. existence of patent protection

The article is a bit vague on some of these – for example, it doesn’t suggest the ideal size of founding team, just that it’s a success factor. And isn’t is obvious that a successful new venture will typically be in business longer than an unsuccessful one? As the authors acknowledge, to a large degree the article leaves more questions open than it answers.

So, getting back to the original question, if you are starting a new venture, or thinking about doing so, will you pay attention to the research and make sure you have all your success factors in a row? (Or that you have an overt benefit, dramatic difference, and real reason to believe?)