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Services - Innovations and Prototypes

Our innovation and prototyping service focuses on the creative aspects of engineering, and serves as a means for our clients to explore and develop novel ideas and product prototypes based on applications driven research.  Focusing on the application of existing new technologies to new product and process ideas enables us to put innovation within reach of smaller companies that do not have the means to support their own development programs by avoiding the cost of basic research typically conducted by academic institutions and the largest companies.  For companies that do not want to be left behind by the innovation of their competitors, but cannot justify the cost of an in house department, this approach offers an ideal way to have a cost effective development team on call.  These clients are typically small firms or firms that have long product cycles and do not require a full time development department but at the same time cannot afford to lose sight of technological evolution.

While innovation and prototyping is only a small part of the product development process, we understand that it is in this creative phase that our clients often need help and new ideas from outside of their environment.  Our activity in a wide variety of fields provides an excellent means for cross fertilization of ideas and technology transfer that can result in significant product advances.
Engaged in this role, we would typically focus on:

• Extracting and understanding the client’s needs, both stated and latent, through a structured identification and prioritization process resulting in a complete definition of requirements.
• Developing a consistent and achievable technical specification complete with verification metrics.
• Surveying and evaluating, on an ongoing basis, technologies from different fields that may be applicable to solve the problem at hand.
• Developing concepts through a structured application of proven methods for encouraging creative thinking and idea generation.
• Applying structured evaluation methods for selecting concepts for prototyping that satisfy the technical specification.
• Conducting preliminary patent searches and devising a preliminary intellectual property approach and technology strategy.
• Producing preliminary designs and analysis to prove feasibility of the selected concept and reduce development cost.
• Refining the conceptual design to produce a detailed prototype design.
• Manufacturing a prototype.
• Conducting evaluation testing of the prototype to verify design analysis and determine compliance with the technical specifications.
• Producing a final report on the development work conducted, including design analysis and recommendations for continued development of the concept.

Although this service is offered as standalone, it can also form part of a complete turnkey approach where required, which would extend to the detailed engineering and functional prototype development of the concept, ultimately to end with a production prototype supported by a technology and intellectual property strategy and production process plan.