1. Produce anything - toys, textiles, furniture, cafe, etc.. Fill all 100 squares as soon as possible.
2. Climb the RL tree as fast as possible. On the way up, produce icebox, telephone, keyboard, fridge, motorcar, motorcycle, luxury motorcar, and city car. Jewelry may also be a path to victory, but nobody has proven it.
3. You won't win your first round, but once you've gotten high enough in the RL tree, and with at least a month left, you'll have all the money you need to do QL research.
4. Research only high RL items at first if you can afford to. Citicar, Luxury motorcar, motorcycle, motorcar. You get more results with fewer levels of research if you concentrate on the end product first. You can make a quality 25 motorcar with only 100 levels of QL if it's all in motorcar. It only takes 33 days to go from QL 0 to QL 100 so you can make QL 25 cars after your first year of research. If you research cars (to 100), engines (to 50), and car bodies (to 50), and steel (to 100) - a reasonable goal for a first round, then you can make QL 50 cars after your first round. Within a year and a half of this plan you should have 18 items up to QL 100: Citycar, Luxury motorcar, motorcycle, motorcar, engines, tires, car body, luxury car body, aluminum car body, aluminum, bauxite, leather, rubber, oil, steel, iron ore, maybe electric motors, and maybe copper wire for example. Then you'll be able to make high QL cars across the board.
5. After trying step 4 as much as you wish, try for high score. Keep a careful watch on ROI, never let it go too low for any 12 hour period. Keep a careful watch on company value: don't let it rise too high in the first 2 months. In the last month of the round, make just as much money as you possibly can.
There are many things left off this map, but I've kept it short and pared down to the bones of how to get there. A year and a half is a long time, and more than enough to figure out how to make vendor score, now the markets work, and what other products you should produce besides the ones I've suggested. But if you follow this map, you'll be in as good a position to win in a year and a half as I am right now. Which turns out to be a pretty good position.