Day 2 Morning - Technology Innovation Week
Interesting agenda for the day - focused on product refinement, high growth issues, offshoring and partnering. Many NZ companies struggle with this part of the lifecycle. We heard this morning that 90% of effort around a product is around commercialising it.
Interesting to hear a bit more about Callaghan Innovation - who they are, what they are doing and how they can help the hi-tech industry in NZ. They seem to have a strong focus on connecting NZ companies with the right people overseas which is great - we are too small to re-invent things. There was also some good commentary about connecting industry with the young up and coming innovators in NZ to pave the way for the NZ Inc. future.
Tim Prestero from Design That Matters (DTM) talked about designing for actual use. Understand the customer and how they will use your product is key to success. Appearances and context of design impacts success - understand who you are working for. DTM makes designs that are hard to use wrong. Tim talked about how they prototyped and developed the Firefly product from DTM - fantastic case study! Incredible for a small company. He talked about how they run a ‘beautiful baby’ contest early on to help most people understand that their baby/idea isn’t quite as pretty as it perhaps seemed.
Grant Ryan from YikeBike shared some insights into how they do rapid prototyping. He talked about how uou can ask people all you like but until they get to interact with the real thing you won’t know what the product needs to look/feel/behave like - get something into the users hands as quickly as possible. Grant gave us a good walk through the history of the products he has been involved with - interesting and diverse range of ideas and products.