The Overlap and Influence of Product Development with Business Development: A Case Study on Insu Health Design, Inc.

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2020-05

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Abstract

Every year industrial design students and inventors around the world come up with beautiful, thoughtful designs for products they would like to bring to market, but more often then not they simply sit in their design portfolios or on a shelf, never filling the need they were intended to. We have a massive amount of knowledge and potential available to us as designers, and there is a path to bringing those products to market, but that path isn’t adequately covered in design education. This study is a deep dive into the development processes of a company I founded last year to bring one of those designs to the market, and works to demonstrate the importance of the overlap between product development and business development. We are developing a portable, personal, battery powered biological medication cooler. The initial design of the product differs vastly from the final design, as the product changed and the business changed as we developed both simultaneously. Through the development of the company, the product, and the underlying technology, the product design and the business plan have changed in response to each other. The final design solution is a battery powered, personal, portable bio-medicine cooler designed to usurp the refrigerator as the permanent storage solution for one’s bio-medicine. The main take-aways from this study were: • Customer discovery helps uncover the true need of the customer, which rendered our initial design useless. • Researching and understanding your addressable market helps to inform what kind of device you should design, and for whom. • Understanding the true potential for the technology you’re developing helps steer the product design into a viable market, possibly filling a need you had not originally intended. • Understanding the potential and limitations of the product and technology you’re developing should steer the business. • You can’t force a product on people who don’t want it. • As business direction changes, the product design changes, and thus the business direction changes more. You cannot be afraid to pivot.

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Keywords

Industrial Design, Product Development, Business Development, Insu Health Design, Insu Portable, insulin storage,

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