ABOUT
This session dealt with the fundamental considerations for approaching Research and product development for the purpose of commercialization. It provided a summary of how one takes a technical idea from inception to market and highlight key aspects critical for success. It touched on areas such as concept development, prototyping for success, customer development, P&L structuring, market analysis, supply chain and outsourcing considerations and aspects. 

“When you are doing what no one has done before, expect it to be difficult” was some of the sage advice from Dr. Nii Dodoo-Amoo in our curriculum program at mHUB discussing building your product’s research and development strategies. Dr. Dodoo-Amoo has had an illustrious career in academia, product development and new product introduction, and business management, and now as an investor.He discussed the cycle for research and product development by detailing:

• Idea Conviction
• Product Development
• Timeline Buffers
• Winning Prototype
• Customer Engagement
• Buy vs Make, and
• Continuous Improvement

Idea Conviction prompts founders to further their Eureka Moment to ask their friends & family (and fools!) to invest in their idea.

Here are some of the items he discussed:

• The founders must have a grounding of Product Development to be able to create a strong moat compising of innovation and commercialization. Ideation is key but the customer perspective is vey important as well.
• It is key to listen to the prospective customer but also know when not to. There is a story about Henry Ford who said that if he were to ask his customers their answer would have been that they needed faster horses.
• Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. But within a given unit area on the semiconductor wafer you can pile on so many transistors. In the beginning of 2010, chip design hit Moore’s Law capacity and new ways had to be designed to compact semi-conductors. Based on his traverse on intense product development in the semi conductor industry where initially the goal was to ramp up Moore’s Law but eventually they were building chips in the atomic nano scale where it becomes difficult to contain electrons due to quantum effects.
• Jobsian Philosophy: Build and they will come. Customers are the expert from a usage perspective but you are the expert when it comes to technology. Have the customer involved. Most often if you ask customers you might get features that they don’t actually want. Make sure that they get features what they pay for. Experts in technology are not experts in usage.
• Timeline and buffers: Product research and development always takes longer than forecasted. MVP Cadence, Analysis Paralysis, Prototype Purgatory and Valley of death for manufacturing – don’t be too ambitious just focus on the key features.
• No investor is believing the time line you give them. Be capitalized, do not wait till you run out of money. Best case in actuality, is your worst case in forecast. Investors are more likely to double down on winners than losers.
• Buy what you absolutely don’t need to make.
• Be relentless about continuous improvement.
• Betting on the team model is always wrong.

“Don’t do everything altogether all at once!” was sound advice by Dr. Dodoo-Amoo as we march thru this Everything Connected theme of building our business at Numorpho Cybernetics.

NI+IN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical Evangelist
nitin.uchil@numorpho.com