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3 Strategies to Mitigate Risk in Product Development

In this on-demand webinar, Lockitron CEO Paul Gerhardt shares his lessons in bringing three versions of the keyless-entry smart lock to mass production and the strategies used to minimize delays and failures. During the webinar Paul offers insights on: Design for Simplicity: Learn how to balance consumer demand with factory capability and avoid over-complicating your […]

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Tracking New Life: Designing Prenatal Hardware

What would you say to an entrepreneur who wanted to make a product that customers could use for literally just nine months?  We’re not talking about planned obsolescence; we’re talking about a literal, physical inability to use the product. Not too smart in terms of user engagement, right? Of course, when we say “prenatal,” it […]

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The (Group) Selfie Jumps Out of the Box: Podo Spotlight

The camera is one of those things that is not only a long-standing historical item (the first one was invented in 1021 AD, if you want to get really technical) but also one that continues to attract innumerable entrepreneurial efforts. You’d think every variation on the camera that could possibly be invented already exists. But, […]

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How One Startup Harnessed the Sun—and Taught People How to Fish: Off Grid Electric Spotlight

Saving the world is great. In theory. But when it comes to the nitty gritty of making your ideals a business reality, you need to swap those rose-colored glasses for some eyes-wide-open realism.  Yet even in this complicated world we live in where multiple realities vie for attention, you can still do a lot of […]

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Dissecting the Apple-like Aesthetic for Consumer Product Design

The Apple aesthetic is easily recalled even by people who aren’t consumer electronics design enthusiasts. What do you think of when you are asked to describe an Apple product? Metal and glass? White? Minimalist? Someone once commented that a prototype I had built looks very “Apple.” It was a rectangular prism with rounded edges, constructed […]

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Getting Intimate with Your Prototype: Lioness Spotlight

All startups have challenges. Funding. Staffing. Marketing. Sales. Customer service. If they’re hardware startups, they need to add supply chain, prototyping, and manufacturing to the mix. That’s all assuming their product or service is rated G. Lioness, a startup in the hardware manufacturing space, has an extra challenge—they  design and manufacture vibrators for women. This […]

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Building Technology to Build Good Habits

Silicon Valley teems with slick hi-tech gadgets that make life, work, and play fun, but that at the end of the day none of us really, truly need. Then there are those devices that do actually improve lives or make play more interactive. But can a device help us change our habits? That’s the question designer […]

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Fictiv Guide to Strategic Hardware Product R&D

As Thomas Edison once said, “Discontent is the first necessity of progress.” Many entrepreneurs set out to build a product out of personal frustration. In this situation, the first R&D activity is often researching technologies that can be harnessed to solve the problem on hand. Sometimes, R&D activities are carried out to productize and capitalize […]

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Doing Better Than Good: How WHILL is Redefining the Wheelchair

What’s tougher than creating a new product in a well-established market? Creating a new product in a well-established market that happens to be not sexy, and for some even taboo. We’re referring to the wheelchair. Historically, the wheelchair has been associated with disability, old age, or some kind of infirmity. While multi-billion dollar empires have […]

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Built Tough, Built Loud: The Development Story Behind the Loudest Speaker On the Market

Some of the products in our world are brand new—they’re the things we “didn’t know we needed,” the innovations that ramp up our experience of life a few notches. You know, like the Internet, the iPhone, and now all those Internet of Things things. Plenty of other products are age-old, traditional, ubiquitous. We also can’t […]