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Five critical goals that ID:s can help a team to achieve when developing new products:

1. Utility: The product’s human interfaces should be safe, easy to use, and intuitive. Each feature should be shaped so that it communicates its function to the user.

2. Appearance: Form, line proportion, and color are used to integrate the product into a pleasing whole.

3. Ease of maintenance: Products must also be designed to communicate how they are to be maintained and repaired.

4. Low costs: Form and features have a large impact on tooling and production costs, so these must be considered jointly by the team

5. Communication: Product designs should communicate the corporate design philosophy and mission through the visual qualities of the products.

Questions to ponder along the road to a design:

1. Who will buy your product?

You must make sure that there is a market for your new product, and that it is not ‘a solution looking for a problem’. To do this, protect your idea (see 5) and then discuss it with your personal contacts and people involved in the industry that your product is relevant to.

2. How many potential customers are there?

First, you need to find out the total size of the market that might buy your product (cyclists, plumbers, whatever). Then, you need to estimate the percentage of that market that might be interested in your product. Finding out the number of sales for similar products can help make the figures more realistic.

3. Who will you be competing with?

All products have competitors. Thoroughly examine yours, both the obvious ones and those that provide a similar solution to the problem that you are trying to address. When you have done that, work out the strengths and weaknesses of your new product compared to the competition and look for the areas of competitive advantage. This will lead on to asking…

4. What will make your product the best choice?

You will need to identify clear benefits or qualities that differentiate your product from the competition. Examples of positive differentiators are better appearance, higher quality, ease of use, durability and environmental benefits. Avoid using low cost as the only means of differentiation – it just makes your business look cheap. Go on Wikipedia and search for ‘product differentiation’ for more information on this topic.

5. Can your product idea be protected?

Making sure your idea is protected is essential. During your initial discussions, you can prepare a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that binds the signatories to keep your ideas secret. You can then explore patents and design registration. Be aware that good patent advice and searches can cost several thousand pounds.

6. Which standards will your product need to meet?

All products sold in the EU need to be CE marked, and some must comply with stringent safety, environmental and performance criteria. Some of these involve detailed testing routines that have to be carried out on prototype parts by specialists. The British Standards website is a good starting point to see which standards will apply to your product.

7. How will your product be manufactured and sold?

Will you make the product yourself or will you sub-contract production to someone in the UK or Asia? How much are you prepared to investing tooling and production set-up? Will you sell the product direct to the public, sell through retail outlets, or sell the idea to another company? These issues need to be considered at the outset, as they will have a significant impact on commercial success.

8. How much will all this cost?

In addition to patent advice (see 5), the design and development of a product, including the data needed for manufacture, can cost anywhere from several thousand to many tens of thousands of pounds. Prototyping and testing to meet standards, etc., can also cost several thousand pounds. Production tooling for a simple one piece moulding may be a couple of thousand pounds, whilst a large complex product may cost hundreds of thousands to tool up for. Promotion and marketing also requires significant investment if it is to be effective. The important thing to recognize is that very few products can be developed, produced and launched for less than a six figure sum.

9. How will you pay for it?

If your funds are limited, it is essential to phase the work so that your risks are minimized. The first phase will be protecting your intellectual property. The second phase will be developing a ‘proof of concept’ model that you can use to demonstrate your basic idea. You should be prepared to spend several thousand pounds to achieve this. With this model and a good plan (see below) you will then be able to approach investors to gain funding for full commercial development.

10. Do you have a plan?

All the issues above – and other essentials like how you will survive financially while you are working on your idea – need to be written up in to a detailed business plan. This will make your business idea more credible to investors, but will also enable you to minimize your risks.

In the absence of an answer to one, or more, of the questions above, a novel solution has arisen with crowd-sourcing a product. In the past the only solution if you lacked the ability to get a product to market was to seek help in the form of either venture-capital and/or selling a share of your product control to an individual/group who could then help bring your product to market. With crowd-sourcing, a designer can either raise funds from a community, or even pare off tasks to the community. Often there's an inherent loss of control in the product much like in established venture capital structures, but the margins are far better for the modern designer.