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

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.