There are three financing models for new product design and development: Flat Fee, Hourly Fee For Service, and Reduced Fee + Equity. Searching for a product design firm to help with your new product idea is tough. Using Google or a platform like DesignRush will give you dozens of potential firms with a range of services, pricing models, and experience. The challenge is choosing the right firm that will deliver a successful project right, the first time.  Understand what finance models firms offer will help you make the right choice. […]

Before jumping into the design of your hardware product, make sure you ask yourself these 5 questions: 1) How will your product compete? 2) Who will lead your development effort? 3) How will you validate your product design? 4) How will your business model for acquiring new customers impact your design? 5) How will your new product fit into your product portfolio plan?

The history of Canadian invention has spanned more than a century with over one million patents filed - yet few people can name more than one or two Canadian inventors. The most common name that comes to mind is Alexander Graham Bell – the inventor of the telephone in 1867. Over 125 years later Mike Lazaridis & Doug Fregin sought to greatly improve the telephone through adding wireless email functionality – this was the start of Canada’s treasured RIM (Research in Motion) corporation. In between these two great feats of […]

Looking back 10 years, electronics were essentially there own product category, now more so that Now more so than every eletronics are being integrated into more and more products. For companies exisitng companies looking to venture into this product cateogry and new startups looking to build this product it can poses challenages. Especially when firms look for outside help with their product design. For example, this could ha 10 years ago product cateogry all on theire ow now integrated into everything for example, a fridge has to be more than […]

"Design 1st sees trust as the main ingredient in product development" -  Ottawa Business Journal The main ingredient to successful product development isn’t silicon, its trust. There are common practice rules of invention and a real requirement for trust between a product development team and the ideas person when creating and developing new inventions to bring to the market. The process starts with a great idea.  In the case of Design 1st client Standard Innovation, a careful process was followed between the Design 1st product development team and the inventor […]

With a world of data at your fingertips, quickly determining if a new product idea is already on the market should be easy and fast. Unfortunately, for many companies, would-be inventors and entrepreneurs harnessing the power of Google for market information and related patent data can be just out of reach. While basic keyword searches and a quick look through Google images may provide easy low hanging data fruit, access to the high value bits takes a little more search skill knowledge. Design 1st has developed our search acumen and business expertise helping inventors […]