Maker Movement: Innovation to Productization
By Bob Martin for Mouser Electronics
Key Facts
- A Pivot International blog post states that for every seven product ideas, only one will yield a successful product.
- Research for Lab42 suggests that more than a third of consumers like owning products that make them look innovative to others.
- A Wired article titled "The Sensor-Based Economy" cites research estimating that by 2020, 20.8 billion objects will be sensor equipped and internet connected.
The number of technology makers—that is, people using basic electromechanical components to build something new—is increasing, and that increase influences professional electrical design engineers. These innovators are now incorporating products an amateur maker might use, such as a single-board computer or a module, into their innovation process. At the same time, the quality of the tools available to amateur makers is increasing, making it even easier and more cost-effective for professional electrical design engineers to incorporate these tools into their own work. The costs of iteration are lower, and iteration can happen more quickly. It's also easier than ever before to add sensors and take advantage of code examples to build relatively complex systems without investing a lot of time. All that adds up to a faster track from innovation to product, and it increases opportunities for design engineers looking to bring their ideas to market.
Going from an idea to a successful product has always presented multiple business and technical challenges for innovators. Today, three developing trends have the potential to ease some those challenges even while they create new ones. To clear the path from innovation to productization, electrical design engineers need to know how those trends will affect them in 2019.
Trend 1: Speed
Speed is one key trend changing the way innovations become products. Thanks to 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and hardware accelerators, electrical design engineers can now turn their ideas into prototypes incredibly quickly and get feedback fast. That acceleration makes it easy to iterate, which benefits designers, their companies, and even their customers. It can also create the illusion that the entire innovation-to-productization process can and should speed up.
Take a pair of electrical design engineers with a brilliant idea for a product. They've built a version that works—at least under the right conditions—and they take it to a maker faire. After attracting positive attention, they go to a hardware accelerator with the goal of radically shrinking their prototype from, say, the size of a lunchbox to the size of a deck of playing cards. What happens?
Unless the system is very simple, there are so many changes happening all at once that the new, much smaller version is unlikely to work the first time. To complicate matters, with a complex system crammed onto a small board, it's difficult to test and debug the design.
An incremental approach is slower but more effective. Reducing the product size in stages gives you the chance to debug interim boards and optimize the layout. Our pair of engineers may resist this step because the interim board layouts take time and incur costs, but at the end of the day, they'll save both time and money. The incremental approach pays for itself because problems can be isolated and solved throughout the process.
Trend 2: Access to Customers
Easy access to customers is another trend that affects the innovation-to-productization cycle. In fact, it can lead to the valley of death. To understand what that means, let's revisit our pair of engineers. They've made it to the stage where they have a viable product and have even sold a few hundred units online. A major retailer has noticed and places an order for a few thousand units.
Fulfilling that order requires a big upfront investment in everything from material to equipment. Our engineers assume that they'll be able to fund that investment with the money from the retail sales, but retailers often pay out slowly, potentially just once a quarter. Now, the pair is at risk of falling into the valley of death: the time gap between when money goes out to pay for upfront costs and when revenues come in.
The valley of death can destroy a young company, no matter how great the new product. To avoid it, innovators must secure sufficient capital before they try to fulfill a big order. One note about what sufficient truly means: Unexpected problems are guaranteed to pop up during the manufacturing and distribution processes, so the innovators should secure more capital than they think they'll need.
Design engineers face another, similar risk when turning innovations into products: death by crowdfunding. In this case, our pair of engineers decide to ask for $25,000 to build 500 units but end up receiving more than $1 million in pledges. Now, they have to build 20,000 units. They simply can't do it because they'll need years to scale up to that level of production, and few customers will wait that long.
Trend 3: The Impact of Sensors
A third trend that design engineers need to consider when going from innovation to product is the impact of using sensors. So many devices are now equipped with sensors that interference can become a problem. For example, radio-frequency interference, such as from antennas, can cause inaccurate sensor readings. Engineers should test sensor results to ensure that they're accurate and repeatable.
Another sensor-related challenge is durability. Just because a sensor-equipped product worked well for a few days in an indoor, climate-controlled environment doesn't mean the product is ready to ship. Again, engineers should test the sensors under various conditions and for varying periods to ensure that they'll last in real-world usage situations. In fact, even if the product isn't equipped with sensors, it's an excellent idea to give the product to other people and dare them to find problems with it.
Getting Help: Hardware Accelerators
Fortunately, design engineers don't have to cope alone with the potential challenges these trends present. Hardware accelerators and product development companies offer many ways to connect with helpful resources. They host events that are usually low cost or free as well as the chance to network. Meeting people in that space is invaluable because they can offer feedback that could save you a lot of time. People at these events also know other people who can offer manufacturing resources, venture capital, or simply useful connections.
Some design engineers worry that telling other people about their innovations creates the risk of idea theft, but you can always ask for someone to sign a nondisclosure agreement. And, remember: Professionals running hardware accelerators have to preserve their reputations to remain successful. They don't want to risk becoming known as untrustworthy.
Hardware accelerators can also offer insights into the specific needs of individual markets. After all, consumers want products with different characteristics than business users. Consumers want intuitive user interfaces, with simple, easy-to-understand menus and clearly labelled buttons. Business users want products that work reliably and won't disrupt their processes. An electronic cash register, for example, has to have a quick error-recovery process. Otherwise, cashiers could spend valuable time trying—and failing—to restart it while customers grow frustrated with long lines and may even decide to go elsewhere to make their purchases.
Industrial users want products with robust designs that will work as advertised. When industrial products are distributed at scale, they're often treated roughly, subjecting them to vibration or shock that could damage key components. Connections you make through a hardware accelerator can help you anticipate and prevent these kinds of problems.
In addition to making productizing an innovation easier, connecting with others can spark new ideas. Tech is due for the next truly disruptive innovation. Perhaps it will come from you, but remember: An innovation can succeed only if it's successfully productized.
A maker before it was a term, Bob Martin has been tearing apart things to see how they work all his life. He has done everything from installing specialized instruments at arctic weather stations to support atmospheric research campaigns. Now, serves as the "Wizard of Make" for Microchip, where he keeps the maker spirit alive within Microchip, educates aspiring makers, and continues to create, experiment and explore. He lives in Sunnyvale, California, with his wife, twin daughters, a cat with no teeth, and a garage full of surplus wire and "vintage electronics" that really should be recycled.
