If you have been following along, you have made a lot of progress on your idea.  If not do a quick catch up, you will learn a lot and we will be on the same page:

Concept Research

Market Research

This is where we often get clients so for some self promotion a list of our product development services and information on how we can help you.  Okay now that we are done with that, I will continue as if I am running the show as an inventor / entrepreneur.

Product Engineering Spec (preliminary)- You have started to define the product as the customer sees it, but now you have to go through and find the engineering requirements for the product.  If you have some electronics functions, you need an E.E. and so forth, Start a document outlining these areas and what expertise they might require.

Preliminary Feasibility- Find people to ask about your technical requirements.  Find friends of friends and ask them general questions about the engineering requirements (social networking can help here).  Is it a big deal, or easy?  Has anyone done something like this in the past?  You don’t have to divulge your idea to get some good feedback.

Make a “Ducktape Prototype”- Make something that illustrates the form or function.  It doesn’t have to be pretty, just has to do something.  Don’t go overboard on this, (I once spent a lot of money tweaking and building more of my ducktape prototype and honestly it was a waste of time & money).  It will probably not qualify as a reduction to practice (utility patent requirement), but it will help rally your team (we’ll get to that).

Evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, are you an E.E.?  If you know a little about board design / prototyping perhaps you can get away with doing the first prototype, but it may take hours away from what you are good at like market research.  If you know nothing about circuit board design you have two options, pay someone or get an E.E. on your team.  Getting good team members is a large topic and will probably be another separate blog post.

Examine requirements-  I have been talking about circuit boards,  and E.E.s but there are often many different areas of expertise that are required to design, develop and launch a product.  Areas include: industrial design, mechanical engineering / CAD, material science / manufacturing and so on based on the area of your invention.   Do some preliminary research and put it in your product specifications document.

These steps are quick to write about, but often take a long time to execute.  Some of these topics / subtopics will be expanded on in future blog posts, but you should have an idea of what to do now.  And if you get stuck, we can help you develop your product.

Welcome to the ongoing development saga of the Stack Master 100 for Paper Pro.  We have done our competitive research, defined the product goals and assembled our team.  Now things are picking up speed, but Will it Work?  What does the customer want? and How are we going to work together?  This post will go through and discuss our answers to these questions.

Feasibility - Paperpro’s one touch system “fires” staples through sheets of paper requiring very little force.  Although PaperPro had an existing stapler that could do 60 pages, we needed to know if the technology would penetrate 100 sheets, if the staplers would deform through 100 sheets, and if staples could close after penetrating.  We didn’t yet have a prototype of the Stack Master, but we did have the 60 page stapler.  So we made some minor modifications to the technology and tested several staple possibilities.  The tests showed that the technology could “fire” a staple through 85 pages and with some design changes, we believed that it could easily go through 15 more pages.  Testing required using what we had, tailoring it to the best of our ability and using many different types of staples.

Customer Needs (in engineering terms)- Now we needed to translate the customer needs into engineering metrics.  This step is used in many product development processes, including the House of Quality and the Pough Analysis.  This step requires taking what the product goals are and aligning engineering metrics and values with the desired outcome.

Design Tools- A team large or small, close or far, experienced or novice need to communicate.  This means using the same software, the same analysis strategies, the same document sharing technology and the same project management matrix.  This needs to be spelled out and agreed upon at the very beginning.  There might be some resistance to for example upgrade Solidworks, but that upgrade cost could be potentially dwarfed by a 10X increase in design hours dealing with the discrepancy.  Organization of the file sharing is critical between team members and needs to be enforced.  The design tools were agreed upon as follows:

• FTP site to share documents
• CAD file revisions sorted by date
• Solidworks 2005 / 2006 for CAD
• COSMOS finite element analysis for Solidworks
• Goodman fatigue analysis where appropriate
• Microsoft Excel project management matrix
• EMS diagrams detailing structural integrity

Just like the other PaperPro posts, this is meant to be a guideline for your invention / product development.  As the times change different document sharing technology exists, (we use wiki’s now) and new CAD software exists but the lesson is getting everyone on the same page at the very begining.  These lessons exist throughout all of these steps, test the technology early with anything you have and quantify your customer needs in engineering terms.