The decision of what to invent is more conscience than most believe. Inventions often revolve around your life, work and interests. It is an important decision to make because you will end up spending a lot of time in a specific industry doing research on companies, competitive products and trends. If you are going to be spending days of internet research and lots of money to understand a market it should be transferable into future inventions.

Our clients want to make money on inventions. This is often dependent on the market as much as timing, product features and any other variables. Choosing an area to invent in where the typical customer will feel a problem, look for a solution and be able to pay for a solution is important.

We also invent to make the world better, easier and more fun (or a different positive like safe, affordable etc.). This drive to make the world better is what draw me into my second invention industry child safety. The better the cause, the easier it is to build a team, get early financing (not necessarily large, later financing) and the better you can feel about it.

So where would I invent next??? I am not exactly sure but I’ll give you some idea…

Hobby or Fun: I love to ski, am a very good skier and so hanging out on a ski hill and talking to skiers about a product would be a blast. Same with sailing and golf, although my skill level is not as high.

Safety: I am still drawn to the safety market although I think I would focus on emergencies and weather issues.

Modern Life: What I mean is the information overload and tools to help organize the hectic life that we all live these days.

Environmental: I’d like to do something with the greening up of the world, but not exactly sure about what to do. I’d be in the “bringing technology to consumers” area, not developing the technology.

Where would you invent next?

Some inventors don’t realize how much the manufacturing of their product is going to cost.  This post will go into some detail on the methods that we use to find a great manufacturer.  We generally use MFG.com to go overseas and Macrae’s Blue Book for domestic.  Since most people are interested in going overseas, we will focus on mfg.com.  (we hope to someday use a fellow IANE’s new business once it up and running).

MFG.com started in 2000 and has grown to become the largest online market place for the manufacturing community.  MFG.com puts firms looking to source  manufacturing (lookers) of new or off the shelf parts with suppliers.  Lookers can submit Reguest for Quotes (RFQs) with 3D CAD files and that suppliers can look at world wide.  Manufacturers respond with tooling cost. cost per unit and the terms (timeline, pay net X days and so on).
Using a site like MFG.com can help inventors asses the manufacturing cost of the design early in the process, before building several prototypes.

Manufacturers also provide valueable feedback on the design as far as manufacturability.  For example, manufacturing a complicated snap in system maybe 5X more expensive than using a fastner reducing the time spent on perfecting the snap in system all together.

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.