Managing Partner Tucker Marion will be presenting his new research on start-up innovation outsourcing at the Research and Development Management Conference in Manchester, England between June 30 and July 2.  For more information on the conference please visit: http://www.rndmanagement.info/. The research paper, “Outsourcing Innovation: A Guide for Start-ups”, focuses on lessons and best practices for maximizing the effectiveness of using outside resources to bring your product to market.

The research abstract is below

This paper explores the beneficial impact of outsourcing on new venture innovation development efficiency and effectiveness.  The relationship of outside firms on innovation commercialization is highlighted, with an additional focus on the enabling role service providers such as rapid prototype fabricators and quick-turn manufacturers perform.  We synthesize our research into five distinct lessons, which form a guide for new ventures in selecting and implementing these external resources.  The first lesson is optimizing your firm to allow easy integration of outside resources.  In our study, the most successful firms leveraged a network of outside providers by keeping internal head-count low, and migrating to a software-like agile development processes.  The second lesson is strategically selecting partners that provide more strategic long-term assistance as opposed to only discrete development resources.  These firms help connect channel partners, customers, and new investors.  The third lesson is managing the innovation process through agile milestones, not onerous procedures.  Maintaining a balance between flexibility and discipline is a pathway to success for the new venture.  Next, the ability of the firm to quickly and inexpensively source and have solutions fabricated for internal and external customer testing is essential to an efficient process.   These fast solutions place concepts quickly in the hands of the development team and potential customers – speeding the process to market through rapid vetting of successive iterations.  Finally, the use of quick-turn manufacturers and assemblers can also help the new firm gather important sales data without having to invest large amounts of capital on costly inventory – helping the new venture preserve precious financial capital while capturing data needed for full commercialization.  These guiding lessons not only contribute to applied management knowledge, but outline phenomenon that require further detailed empirical investigation in the space of new venture innovation development.

For additional information on how Flashpoint Development can be your outside innovation experts please contact: info@flashpointdevelopment.com

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.

This is the story of a 14 month adventure in which an idea was developed into a production ready product by Flashpoint Development currently sold at Costco, Amazon and other office equipment retailers. The idea was a stapler using Paper Pro’s One Touch™ spring designed system in an ‘executive’ design that could staple 100 pages. Under direction of the VP of Product Development, Flashpoint Development executed the industrial design, computer-aided-design (CAD), prototyping construction and testing leading up to the mold development.

With no previous stapler design experience our staff immersed themselves in competitive products, customer feedback and sales representative input. The market segmentation confirmed the opportunity for the 3000 and defined the product from the customer’s and PaperPro’s perspective. FlashPoint designed a feasibility analysis maintaining the current patent protection of PaperPro which also provided positive results.

The 3000 looked promising from these early-stages and with PaperPro’s approval we began the industrial design. The Heritage design was chosen and the Uber Fusion Curves variation was selected for prototyping. Based on these designs we began the computer aided design that integrated our industrial design with the technology variations from our feasibility analysis.

3000 version 1.0 was prototyped in China with existing partners and was tested under extreme office operation. Enhancements were identified, designed and prototyped leading up to a design that was created into a production mold ready for the market.

For more information on the PaperPro refer to our Product Development Blog as we will go into detailed steps of each major phase of the project, start to finish.

Always Plan.  You can use anything to plan, Microsoft Project, Excel or even a napkin.  Several tricks that we use and reasons to plan are:

When begining a project it is important to plan out the major phases because lining up resources can take time.  Even if a specific engineering task is months away, start soliciting help because getting your project lined up with the availability of experts can take some time.

Development plans can change.  Unforeseen technological obstacles can emerge in the investigation process.  It is important to build in some flexibility to the plan to account for these unforeseen road blocks.

Planning minimizes risk.  The stage gate process was created to accomplish this.  Setup milestones in your plan that allow you to step back and evaluate progress, direction and the future.  We use several milestones, complete Industrial Design sketchups, CAD renderings, Form Prototype, Functional Prototype, Complete Prototype etc all the way up to Production Run.

The only warning that I will provide is ‘don’t plan on planning’.  Do it right now.