Product development is a rough, bumpy ride with no certain outcome.
It’s always a bracketing process which requires many iterations no matter how methodical the approach.
Sir James Dyson thrives on failure. His vacuum cleaner has been through 5,126 versions. Well tested products often result in recalls.
What replaces a bad idea ? A better one, of course. De Havillands’ culture was that if something
didn’t look right, it probably wasn’t right. The reason airplane windows are rounded is that the Comet broke up in flight because the square windows cracked in the corners.
Thomas Edison famously went through 940 filament candidates before he hit on tungsten. In retrospect
he was more alchemistic than methodical. Failures did not discourage him. Instead, he viewed
failures as data about what did not work.
Today’s short attention span is not conducive to perseverance. By the third iteration, many prospective customers figure we are guessing and dismiss us as incompetent after we are unsuccessful at solving a problem nobody else has been able to solve. Group think kicks in when the big boss gets the super compressed zip file executive thumbnail version. Plastic film is a lot simpler than molding, so we rarely need more than three attempts and there are no molds.
Unlike automotive, our customer’s plant is the proving ground and beta test site.
We can’t run tests at our facility before presenting a version. With each failed iteration, our credibility erodes.
Suppliers who initially appear discouraging or negative are often the best to work with in the long haul. These seasoned veterans already know what will work and what won’t. Contrast this approach with a company whose positive-minded sales rep makes promises the company can’t deliver. Like so many things in life, it’s not complicated entering relationships; it’s extricating oneself which is difficult. In injection molding, molds are the ties that bind. Sadly, the empty promises often lead to ugly lawsuits.
It’s intuitive that the more complex the problem, more perseverance and revisions are required. After nearly sixty years, you might think launches would be old hat for rocket scientists. Everybody except NASA has not given up. Elon Musk said the last disaster was Space-X’s most complex undertaking.
” Design creep” is a plot twist which always sends the process into overtime. Design creep is introduced in two ways. Most often, it’s after the first or second iteration despite our efforts to capture all the performance parameters up front ( see contact us tab ).
“Oh, we forgot to tell you we need the film to ______________ “.
For example, we just found out that a film needs to unroll easily after being stored in a desert warehouse all summer. After the third iteration. Had this requirement been disclosed in the beginning, we could have saved a lot of time, money and plastic. Design creep is also introduced when marketing gets into the act and imposes new features often without thinking through the ramifications. The scary bit is this is America; one must always be thinking of how one could get sued despite best intentions.
It’s important to know if the project is ready for prime time. In the words of one of my former bosses, ” you need to be realistic about whether you are in the development stage or in the commercial phase.” Disasters often occur with wishful thinking when on the cusp of going from development to commercial. And in the words of another of my former bosses, ” there’s only one thing worse than not having a product – it’s having a product that’s not fully baked.”
Much has been written about inventions, the tenuous path to commercialization and accidental discoveries. What we do is relatively simple. If you want us to solve a problem for you, just tell us what you want. The long form on the contact us page is not best practice for capturing leads. In lieu of finding out the performance parameters over the course of literally months, we are trying to capture all the performance parameters up front.
