From Idea to Prototype – Navigating the Valley of Death
By Michael Nizich, Ph.D., Director, Entrepreneurship & Technology Innovation Center (ETIC), New York Institute of Technology
You’re sitting in your living room or kitchen, or some other place where you would not expect the next world changing idea to come to you, but it does. You write it down, you roughly sketch it out on scrap paper, you even ask a few family members or close friends to secretly contemplate the idea and give you some feedback. They do, and it’s a real winner and it’s never been done before. You take great care and invest time and hard-earned money to work with a patent lawyer to protect your idea through the filing of a provisional patent to protect you for the next 12 months. Now, it’s time. All you have to do is build an early phase functional prototype of your idea so that you can show investors that it works and that their money will be well spent once they agree to fund you. You simply need to find someone, somewhere, to build it for you. Welcome to the Valley of Death!
The Valley of Death (VoD) has been described as a series of challenges facing technology-based companies during their early development stages, or more colorfully, the place where awesome ideas go to die. It’s where solutions receive a lot of support to get going, but when it comes to really implementing them, they fall into thin air. At the Entrepreneurship & Technology Innovation Center (ETIC) at New York Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering & Computing Sciences, we help companies rocket over the valley effectively and affordably regularly. As a high technology prototyping center with the business acumen to help entrepreneurs meet their investor goals and requests, we’ve identified a few key factors to help entrepreneurs navigate the valley of death and transition into successful investor demos.
The world of simple products is waning and nearly every new invention has facets of connectivity, basic AI abilities, ergonomic design, and security requirements and even the simplest product has become a complex design to make it viable in today’s marketplace.
The first thing to consider when beginning to cross the valley is not to minimize the creation process. Too many times, we hear “all you have to do is…” or “it’s so simple just…” and this is a very tenuous and possibly costly place to be for an entrepreneur to be. For example, let’s look at a new phone app. Simple right? Well, phone apps require fully individual designs for each phone operating system (e.g., IOS, Android, etc.) and they also need a hosted platform for data, database architecture design, security, and some sort of web interface for central control of the whole system. Not so simple anymore, right? Now add regular enhancements and maintenance to all of those required modules for the life of the business. This is a costly plunge into the valley of death that many entrepreneurs do not recover from. We suggest entrepreneurs be humbler upon entering the valley as to the amount of work that has to be done to get their great idea working and be prepared to see the whole project through regardless of what obstacles may present themselves along the way.
The next thing to consider is to make sure that your prototyping contractor understands your business model and your market space. It may seem like a big ask for someone to care about your business versus theirs, but it will mean a world of difference in the final product quality if you take time up front to make them understand what you are trying to do and who you are trying to do it for. This may be a bit surprising to readers that this is not a standard process in early phase prototype design, but many engineering companies and prototype contractors are extremely linear in their design process. They will do things precisely as you request, no more, no less, if you ask them to. If the contractor understands your goals and markets early in the process, then they can become a bigger part of the design process earlier, versus being just a tool to be called upon when needed, which can lead to a costly nickel and dime approach to a sub-par prototype.
Finally, start with the finished product in mind and work your way backwards. Prototyping companies work on design specifications and are usually paid hourly. If you are constantly changing specs because you are not sure what the final product will, or should, look like, the company is going to gladly appease you with the changes, and they will also gladly charge you for them as well. You can more effectively communicate your needs to the contractor if you begin at the end and see your working product with its casing, electronics, software, user interfaces, and documentation. Just imagine yourself giving the demo of your invention to a room full of investors. What does it look like? How much does it weigh? What kind of sound does it make when running? How much power does it use and how long will it run for? If you answer all these questions and any others that you think are important to your demo, then you can create a product specification that is much more in line with the final product that you want to demonstrate in the end. This can save you thousands of dollars and countless hours, days, or even weeks of design time and delays if you just think ahead a little.
The Valley of Death is all too real. We see it regularly and there is no end in sight. The world of simple products is waning and nearly every new invention has facets of connectivity, basic AI abilities, ergonomic design, and security requirements and even the simplest product has become a complex design to make it viable in today’s marketplace. Hopefully, these three tips will help you save time and money and help you achieve your successful navigation across the valley and into the marketplace!