Product Development

The Product Development Machine

1 New Product Development, or NPD is a process. Patents are always part of it.

Product design is too.

Manufacturing is a flawless part of it and distribution and sales is the deciding success factor.

2 If someone with nothing better to do walked into a large home center, and then a gigantic department store, then one each of all the specialty stores, a drug store as well and even a food market, and then compiled a count of how many products could be identified as manufactured products, the number would be large.

One hundred thousand or a million; it doesn't matter. It would be very large.

3 A large percentage of the products, say 99.9% of them, from dental floss in a unique container for $.99 or a new automobile for $45,000, have a lot in common.

They all come from product producing industries; industries that employ engineering departments, manufacturing facilities, marketing experts and sales and distribution departments to keep the products moving and to add new products to the mix as well.

4 The companies keep growing and producing and that is good for all of us.

The heart of the business world is NPD, or new product development.

5 What about the other one tenth of one percent? Who does that tiny number represent? Those are energetic innovators trying to get their piece of the action so to speak.

6 They each might have a patent for a new product idea they believe in.

They may also have a manufacturing process of sorts that comprises them and a long line of piece part bins.

They themselves may be the sales force service that sells the product at trade shows and on the Internet.

7 Chances are all of them have spent hundreds of hours glued to a work bench laboring over methods to turn their sketches into working breadboards and engineering prototypes.

They've made their ideas real and who knows the magnitude of the rewards that will follow.

8 Maybe one of the large established companies will license or buy the rights to the products, or maybe with more money and much more time, many of the innovators involved will become successful new company owners.

I for one certainly hope so.

9 So! What is development? Development, as I see it, is what companies and individual innovators go through to turn an idea into a product specification ready for manufacturing and sale.

10 The inventing precedes it by many months and maybe even years. Development isn't difficult for those trained in the associated skills.

It's a process where everyone knows what the new product idea is and how it works.

Development is selecting the right manufacturing process for each component, having them made and assembling them for packaging and sale.

11 Once the idea is invented, conceptualized, prototyped, tested and documented, it is ready for design and development.

Those are areas where people with new ideas want to make sure their homework has been done before spending the big bucks on the stages following feasibility and successful testing.

12 Once an idea is defined and tested to a point of accepted feasibility, all kinds of planning for cost-effective development can take place.

Patents can be initiated, and manufacturing processes can be selected.

Design services for the product rapidly follows.

It's only a matter of knowing what you have, how it works and most important,

who is going to buy it, in order to put a business plan in place.

13 That's the rational method used for 99.9% of the products on the market today and should be for the hard-working innovators that represent the remaining.1% of the market as well.

Who Invented the Patent?

1 - Now! Here we are, not millions of years later, but a long 232 years after the first U.S. Patent was signed by President Washington, to whomever it doesn’t matter, for a process described to grow potash.

Fertilizer is fertilizer and in a perfect world, the process would be shared by everyone, and not owned by anyone wanting to manufacture it and sell it.

Capitalizing on the manufacturing of something for a definitive period of time is what a patent is all about.

Ignoring sharing and the benefits of, may actually be what patents are about.

2- I don’t care to go right or left, R or D, with this, but it sure feels like some rich and successful colonial gentleman wanted to make some money and benefit immensely off of the almost penniless farmers around him.

Did he help formulate the governments original patent system; I don’t know?

Maybe it had something to do with keeping the market here, and not worrying about foreign enterprises moving in.

It’s difficult to assess anything accurately that happened two centuries ago.

3- The picture I have in my mind as a result of Early American History Classes is a large group of Colonists pulling together as one.

The Tories were gone as were the foreign speculators when the Colonies were signed and sealed victors of the revolution.

To me, a patent feels like a barrier because it is one. Who knows when the potash process was patented was the first-time whatever process was used was the first time?

4- The first patent in the world was granted in Italy in 1421.

It had something to do with a barge, special because of the hoisting gear.

I wonder if a wheel is mentioned in the patent or a lever of any kind.

What if they were and the new hoisting idea wouldn’t work without them.

Which cave dweller discovered the wheel and the lever thousands of years ago, we’ll never know.

Large rocks roll down hills and the mechanical advantages of a lever are intuitive, or at least easily discoverable.

5- Patents are the results of intuitive thinking.

Everyone innovates. It is a natural right to do so.

No one should own the right to do anything exclusively, which is the only purpose of a patent.

Do inventions come from discoveries? Some may, but discoveries were always there, so nothing was actually invented.

6- Discovering water boils instantly at 212F is not an invention.

Nothing natural should be. If one used boiling water to set a mercury tube accurately to the thermometer numeral 212, would that be an invention?

I hope not although I wouldn’t be surprised if someone were granted a Process Patent for marrying the two, instead of science getting a chance to shine.

7- Inventing might be like an Easter Egg Hunt.

Whoever finds the first egg automatically gets all the others.

We know that isn’t how it works.

Why do we teach children otherwise? Because what we show them is right.

No one should own anything at the expense of anyone else.

8- Commercialization is behind all inventing.

It always was and always will be. If it’s going to be commercialized, make sure it’s in our back yards.

One would have to be from Never-Never Land to believe a unique idea and process would be eagerly shared amongst all of us with no one trying to capitalize on it for themselves, even it wasn’t their idea.

If any of us didn’t snatch it up personally, a foreign enterprise would. That, I’m sure, was the rational of our youthful Colonial Government not so long ago, the year of 1790.

Realness is Really a Word

1-Realness……It’s not a word, but it has immediate meaning. Realness is a quiet wannabe-adjective that conveys legitimacy, usefulness, value, tangibility, success, and many other words that are never anything but positive.

2-All words have meanings, and a ring of sensitivity as well. Prototype hardly ever feels good.

Conceptual rings of only dreamland.

A sketch suggests something too vague to draw accurately. Preliminary rings of being far from ready.

3-I like the word realness,  the word that isn’t a word.

When people trust us by showing us a new product idea, and any other project that takes initiative and creativity, we might respond by saying “it has realness.”

They will smile, not because they know realness is not a word, but because it will make them feel good.

4-Realness: a positive state of anything that isn’t real but can be.

*******

5-As children, we envied the obviously artistic students in our classrooms.

Often, the difference in talents discouraged us, smothering any desire to even try.

We didn’t know we were artists as well. Our teachers and parents told us we were, but we didn’t believe them.

6-Watching a woodcarver carefully and patiently turning a beached and weather-beaten tree root into a wood sculpture of an octopus, with every deliberate push of his knife, I asked how I could get started in such a rewarding hobby.

7-“Buy a knife and start” was his answer,  pleasantly delivered without looking up.

8- I studied an oil painting of a forest oasis set in the middle of the woods, the sun and clouds reflecting off the still water, with the trees in the background standing tall in detail and fading off into black brush strokes.

I looked with obvious curiosity and with the aid of a loop, at the detail of the plants along the edge of the pond, expecting to see more detail.

I only saw brushstrokes. Standing back a couple of feet, I too saw what the artist felt was important.

9-Good photographers are true artists, although they seldom get the credit they deserve.

Photography is using a camera to capture what we see before the camera does.

Having the ability to direct the camera to capture what the artist sees beforehand is an instinctive  understanding of what the camera can do to satisfy his or her imagination.

Camera technology is gradually catching up to the expectations of creative photographers, without failure.

10-Why would a woodworker sit in his shop all day with his handsaw, mallet, chisels, and a stack of dried stock destined to become something of real value?

The obvious answer is he’s able to because he’s an artist.

His blueprint is engrained in his mind.

12- His son may seek the peacefulness of his shop after working all day at his profession, one that has nothing to do with woodworking.

He’s honed his talents to the level he can produce with precision what his mind allows him to see, all with tools that have motors, all finely tuned to safely serve him. He’s an artist as well.

13- Sculpturing is a form of art no one can dispute.

Like the buildup of numerous coats of paint on a canvas, clay is a media that continuously challenges the satisfaction of the artist.

Three-dimensional critiquing of a sculpture is brutal. Nothing is left to the imagination.

Work is examined every degree three hundred and sixty times.

Something inside the sculpturer’s  head tells the artist  when his art is worthy of casting.

It looks like the vision that flashed his imagination when his modeling clay was a large-gray-cube of sticky mass in a brown-cardboard box.

14-Product Innovators are a different kind of artist.

They’re unique in the sense their creative ideas are focused on making money.

What’s wrong with that?

15-Most woodcarvers, artists, photographers, sculpturers and woodworkers all eventually want to sell their creations as well.

Their investment in most cases is mostly time.

Time is a commodity, more important than we realize as we use it up.

Their creations will ultimately be of value to someone because they are art, and art is always of value.

They never really lose money with anything they undertake.

16-Unfortunately, most product innovators lose money, because most product ideas have a commercial focus and destination, not an artistic one to compliment the commercial needs.

The Stone Age Innovator

1-Let’s pretend we were born five million years ago, and life was what it was, simply a very challenging day-to-day existence.

Pondering, laying under a tree next to a pristine running brook, Cal, a cave dweller, took the small branch he was nibbling on for something to do other than to keep his eye out for anything that might want to invite him to dinner, and scratched an inverted “v” into the dirt and the first invention of all time occurred.

2-When we take only a few minutes to think about what life may have been like in prehistoric times.

It is safe to tell ourselves that nothing was yet invented.

The first human-like inhabitants of the world were blessed with air, water, vegetation, and dirt.

Other than other forms of animal life, there wasn’t much of anything else.

Compared to today, there wasn’t anything.

What there was though, was an abundance of opportunity to innovate, which they did instinctively to survive, and for no other reason.

3-For a few moments while stopping for a light, or waiting in line to order your coffee, or not listening to a word your boss is saying or twiddling your thumbs trying to think of a meaningful sentence to start your progress report with, or from doing something very important because you know  you can, take a look at everything around you for a long minute or two.

There’s no need to suggest why. For as far as your eyes can see and even beyond that distance are man-made objects, thousands of them in all directions, and guaranteed even more for as far as you can see.

4-Now, what did the dude chewing a twig on the banks on the unpolluted river see?

Not a lot, other than vegetation and water, and the air he felt but didn’t see, and therefore paid no attention to it.

5-What he saw earlier was a way to get out of that damp cave everyone he ever knew lived in.

He found a long branch that he easily ripped the smaller branches from and set it horizontally into the waiting crotches of branches from two trees not too far apart.

He then spent the better part of the day leaning smaller stripped branches against the traversing main member of his new shelter.

6-What we now see around us every day and every minute of our lives are the results of not inventions, because I don’t feel inventions existed before patents, but natural innovation, or maybe instincts alone.

We know around us are thousands of objects originated by others, millions if we move backwards in time to the beginning.

A chair was once a stump. A pop-tent was once a lean-to.

A hammer was once a club. An axe was once a sharp stone.

Clothing didn’t exist unless the weather suggested otherwise.

7-Man, by instinct alone, has been innovating for millions of years.

Innovation was based on need and practicality.

A lean-to didn’t leak because it was covered with mud and sod.

A fire inside didn’t smoke the occupants out because they accidently discovered only a vent was needed.

A door eventually graduated to an animal’s hide, replacing the take-apart branch-door, or barrier.

Imagine the progress that was made when the wheel was discovered inadvertently when pushing a tree trunk around and the lever was discovered when moving large boulders about.

8-Innovations go back millions of years.

Naturally, innovators, not inventors, do as well.

One name or the other, they always were, and they always will be.

We can’t invent people. We can’t invent food. We can’t invent shelter.

These are all natural necessities for survival.

9-Imagine what would happen if one former cave dweller tore down the shelter of another cave dweller, only because he made his first and therefore no one else could copy it.

What if one used clay instead of mud for the outer layer of protection What if one had two chambers instead of only one.

What if no one cared who learned from who, and only cared about learning and survival.

What if all those improvements weren’t patented not because patents didn’t exist, but so others had a natural right to benefit from them.

10-None of us really know what was and what wasn’t five million years ago.

However, we know there was water, air, dirt, vegetation, man, and many animals, stronger but not near as bright as those walking upright.

Dirt wasn’t good for much until an old woman of about fifteen discovered blueberry bushes growing from where she and others relieved themselves when warranted.

They weren’t there before. Seeds and fertilizer may have been discovered then.

Only a discovery and not an invention, a patent lawyer of today might proclaim.

A mere two million years later, everyone had blueberries, but grown from seeds alone, extracted from  dried berries and not human waste.

Once or Twice Around the Product Idea Bulb is based on actual experience developing consumer products, both employed by Polaroid Corporation as a product development engineer as well as self employed by L.Douglas, LLC.