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The Early Stages Of Product Development Are The Territory Of An Industrial Design Company
If you have an idea for a product, you might not feel like you need an industrial design company. You might think that you can do what’s necessary to come up with a working prototype and then pitch the product to companies until one of them expresses an interest and pays you for the rights to mass-produce it. This scenario is unlikely, though. The best ideas for products only get off the ground with a whole team of skilled and creative individuals working behind the scenes on every phase and aspect. You will find all of those individuals in one place when you hire an industrial design company.
The Concept Development Phase
The truth is, most products don’t get beyond this phase without the help of an industrial design company. The reason is that on your own, even if you have what you think is going to be a revolutionary and world-changing idea, you probably don’t have the technical expertise to correctly assess what’s likely to work or fail with a given design.
If you bring in an industrial design company, they can do a risk evaluation of the critical features. If there are electronic components in the design, for instance, they can determine if they are safe. They can work up different versions of the product and decide which one of them is most likely to be aesthetically pleasing to the consumer. If necessary, they can do market research before they even get to the prototype phase.
After design planning will come concept experimentation. They will refine and test the function and appearance until they are sure that what they have carries the highest chance of success. It is only then that an industrial design company will move on to engineering, where the efficacy of their vision will be further tested.
In reality, most product ideas stall if the person who came up with the notion is inexperienced in the creative arena. Great ideas don’t magically become products, and that is why industrial design companies offer so many different services. The early stages of product design can be the most critical sometimes, and if you are getting discouraged in the early going, having a consultation with an industrial design company and learning about their process can do you a world of good. They might act as a lifesaver for your idea, and without them you may need to consign it to the historical scrapheap, another potential world-changer that never made it out of the inventor’s head.