The 1995 survey of MIT graduates who have founded their own companies offers some fascinating insights into these knowledge-based companies and what makes them successful. The survey listed a number of competitive factors and asked respondents to rank each of them on a scale of 0 to 5, with 5 representing the highest importance. The results are summarized in Chart 4 below, which shows the average response to each factor across all industries. Appendix Table 8 provides more detail, breaking down answers by industry, region, and company size.
Price is least important to finance and consulting firms.
Time to market is particularly important in electronics and instruments, software, and aerospace and least important in management consulting and finance. Innovation, new technology, and time to market are particularly important to founders who graduated in the last 15 years. Government programs are important to success only for aerospace firms. Somewhat surprisingly, there was relatively little variation by region in the ranking given to government regulation. To the extent that there is regional variation, Massachusetts firms actually rated government regulation as slightly less important than founders in other states.