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Product Licensing: How to Turn Your Design into a Royalty Generating Machine

You’ve got a great product idea, but you also have a full-time job you love and no desire to start a company. Do you just shelve it? Nope! Instead, consider licensing your product to earn extra income from the royalties. Here’s how you can make it happen. What Licensing is and How it Works Licensing is […]

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Designing for Experience, Not Disruption

We live in a world replete with devices. Tablets, smartphones, desktops, laptops, smart watches, cars, TVs, thermostats, door locks. Probably toasters soon, too. Surely we don’t need another “thing.” Surely, if we want to do something as simple as browse through our photos, we can just pull up our tablets, smartphones, or plug our camera […]

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3D Printing and the Future of Distributed Manufacturing [VIDEO]

We live in an era of centralized manufacturing. The prototyping and manufacturing ecosystem is dominated by massive companies that invest a ton of capital in warehouses full of machines that can fulfill demand. When I was at Ford’s Silicon Valley Innovation Lab working to speed up development cycles, I realized there are real problems with this system. […]

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The Second Coming of VR: This Time It’s “Real”

Back in the 1990’s, virtual reality (VR) was a big thing. The next big thing, the media sang enthralled. Trouble was, the technology infrastructure wasn’t built out to allow any sort of appreciable user base to develop, and so VR stayed on the fringes, its tentative flames kept alive by a small contingent of diehard […]

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The Zen of Product Design: How Lockitron Let Go of the Extraneous and Non Essential

Entrepreneurs are known for falling so hard for their own products that they can’t see past all the fancy features. Not to knock all those labors of love, but when it comes to building products that work (and brands that last), a little cool-headed distance goes a long way. Certain industries lend themselves better to […]

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4 Fundamental Objectives of Prototyping Hardware

When you set out to prototype a new hardware product design, it might seem like there are an overwhelming number of features to test and develop. You want your product to be the best it can be, but the path to get there from a great idea isn’t always clear. While prototyping hardware is a difficult and […]

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How to Work with Community and Come Out with a Product That’s Better, Not Worse

Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” Apple makes beautifully functional—and functionally beautiful—products that people are passionate about and cannot seem to live without. The company would famously keep all of […]

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5 Essential Tips for User Testing Your Hardware Project

Most hardware-focused startups have only one chance to build a product that users will value, enjoy using, and adopt into their lives. If a user has difficulty using a new device or isn’t able to seamlessly integrate it into her life, chances are it will end up in the home ‘electronics graveyard’, banished to the closet or basement to […]

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Gest: Redesigning Human-Computer Interaction

It’s one thing to design a product that improves the way something works, makes things fun, or helps you explore new ways of doing things. It’s quite another to change routine, daily behavior, like typing or using a keyboard. That’s the challenge Gest is taking on. Gest is, in the company’s own words, a digital […]

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3 Steps to Go From Digital to Physical

We talk a lot about iteration here at Fictiv because it’s the foundation for lean hardware development and lean hardware development is the key to bringing successful hardware products to market. Iteration refers to the cyclic process of refining a design until you’ve achieved the established product requirements, outlined in your PRD (product requirements document). […]