Archive for category Invention
Industrial Design for New Inventions
Posted by admin in Industries, Innovation, Invention, Inventors, Uncategorized on January 14, 2012
So you’ve got a great new invention that will change the world and / or make you very rich? The question now is what you do with big ideas and how you take from an abstract concept floating around in your skull into something that you can sell to others on a large scale and that will change the world for the better?
Well this will partly depend on your discovery, and if you have come up with new software for example then you will not really need anything and manufacturing can not just roll out their own ideas and see if it takes off. This works for Mark Zuckerberg, and can work for you.
But for most of our big ideas we are not software inventions, but more practical things that can really help us around the house. Things like chairs or design new tools that meet existing needs. Eureka moments come at times when we find ourselves trying to do something and fight more than necessary. Would not it be much easier ‘if’ we think – and that’s when we have a great idea. Perhaps a new type of packaging that makes the food more fresh while it is easy to use for the consumer, or it may be a new type of game that can play with the family.
Throughout history there are countless cases that Eureka moment and they have very much shaped the way today’s society. Every time you use a screwdriver, drinking from the cup, leaning on the table, playing with power ball gyroscope, walked on stage, or extra-long sweep with a broom … You use the discoveries of others. Did you know that the Hoover vacuum cleaner was created by none other than President Hoover? Similarly, perhaps even more surprising the cat flap was invented by Isaac Newton!
So how do you get on board with creating nonsense? Well once you have your invention you need to get it produced on a larger scale and you need to have it perfected. Industrial design for new discoveries help you to do this, take your idea and make it more workable. For example ‘Very Light Car’ recently won the automotive X prize, which means will get the funds to be developed for commercial sale. But a provision of the prize is that the car must have an industrial design so it will be possible – this is an example of how an ‘idea’ is not enough without being able to be applied in the real world.
There are other actions and steps to take when you have a genius idea, and you for example need to be protected by law against theft of your intellectual property – there are few things more depressing than going to start a business only to find that someone else has beaten you to punch using your idea. To avoid this, make sure that you look into getting your idea patented before you take further. Be careful who you tell about the new concept and only released once you have the power to launch it commercially. This way even if someone else steals your concept, they will come late to the party and you will have captured the majority of market share.
Drug Discovery Is a Costly Process
Drug discovery is the branch of science which deals with the design and discovery of drugs. The design of novel drugs is concerned with the various fields like medicine, pharmacology and biotechnology. In the earlier days, discovery of drugs was done by recognizing an ingredient in the traditional medicine. The drug discovery in those days was accidentally made. Today, the discovery of drugs was done by studying about the disease and the infection caused at a physiological and molecular level.
Drug discovery is a process which carries out primarily the recognition of candidates for the drugs, their synthesis, characterizing them, screening them and conducting in Vitro studies to learn about its efficacy. If the chemical compound has passed the tests in all these steps, it will go for developing into a future drug. This drug that is developed will be later used for clinical trials.
There are major breakthroughs that have occurred in the recent past regarding the improvement in the technology used for drug discovery. Though the technology supports this process effectively now, the drug discovery was observed as an expensive, lengthy and inefficient process. The research done for the purpose of the discovery of a new chemical entity spent around US$1.8 billion.
For the drug discovery to go smoothly, it is necessary to know about the various drug targets or disease causing defective proteins. To understand about the targets properly in every disease, it would be convenient if the entire knowledge about the human genome is exposed. As the project on human genome has revealed about every gene and its encoding details, it has become easy for the scientists to remove the barriers in identifying the therapeutic targets. Difficulty in identification of targets has been a problem since some time for initiating the drug discovery process. Human genome project has diminished that limitation.
There are new targets and established targets. Choosing new targets might be difficult for the drug discovery cycle as they do not have the known history and pathway in the biochemical aspect. The genes involved in their synthesis will not be clear. In the case of established targets, it is easy for designing the drug based on it, as the target is already established with enough information.
The designing of drugs can be done by In-Silico methods which take very less time for generation of lead molecule. The lead molecule that is designed can be sent later to the synthesis and it can be tested for its target inhibiting ability. This will prove the ability of the drug to even restrict the disease. The lead molecule can be used for screening purpose by using a technique called “High-throughput screening” or popularly called as HTS.
In this process of HTS, the various chemicals which are similar to the designed lead molecule can be used for matching with the inhibiting properties against the desired target. This is done by using them in in-vitro studies. The chemicals which are found to be having target inhibition properties will be screened. This compound can be made to undergo pharmacophore and structure-activity relationship studies.
If the compound shows enhanced activity against the desired target, decreased activity against the unrelated target, and possess ADME properties it can be selected for further tests. The quality of the compound can be tested using Lipinski’s rule of five. Apart from high-throughput screening virtual throughput screening is also done to bring the leads very fast into the picture. Lead generation is also done using combinatorial chemistry. For this procedure many of the natural products from the plants and animals can be used for development of drugs against bacterial infections. Ultimately the discovered drug will be synthesized and sent for clinical trials to be released into the market successfully.
Product Manager Must Innovate Can Perform discovery and Not Lose their Shirts
Posted by admin in Business, Innovation, Invention, Marketing on January 3, 2012
What’s your plan for making your product a success going forward? Hoping some magic fairy shows up and makes your competition go away overnight? Well good luck with that! I suspect that your management is probably pressing you and your product team to do some of that “innovation” stuff. Got any ideas on how to make it happen?
The Two Flavors Of Innovation
We all think that we know what innovation is, but do we really? We view innovation as being the process by which successful products get invented like the iPhone, the Kindle, etc. However, those product teams have access to some sort of magic pixy dust that the rest of us can’t touch. How are we supposed to use innovation to make our products better?
Really smart people, like Dr. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, have taken a close look at this innovation thing and they’ve discovered that not all innovation is created the same.
What they’ve found is that there are actually two different types of innovation. The first is what we’re all familiar with: the blockbuster breakthrough thought. This is the kind of thinking that produced the iPad. Not bad – if only product managers could have these types of thoughts every day!
Thankfully there is another type of innovation. This is the incremental change type of innovation. It’s a much smaller type of breakthrough, but we have a lot more of them and they turn out to be just as important.
For you see, the blockbuster breakthroughs are built on top of a whole bunch of incremental breakthroughs. In fact, the researchers have discovered that you really can’t have a blockbuster breakthrough if you don’t have a bunch of incremental breakthroughs in order to support the blockbuster.
How To Innovate With Your Product
I can almost hear you saying, “oh great, so now not only do I have to have blockbuster innovations, but now I also have a bunch of incremental innovations…” Well, yes and no.
Instead of getting all tied up in knots about what you do or don’t have to do in order to innovate with your product, it might be simpler to implement a framework for allowing innovation to happen.
One way to do this is to look at innovations as they relate to your product as being organized in a pyramid fashion. At the base of the pyramid are all of the little ideas that are always popping up about how the product can be improved. These can come from anywhere: internally or from customers.
The ideas that are “no-brainers” need to be implemented right away. The ones that will require some time and investment, but which look promising should be thought of as moving to the next layer of the innovation pyramid.
At this level, investments are made, changes happen, and innovation starts to become apparent in different parts of the product if you look at it hard enough. Nothing revolutionary, but the product does keep getting better.
The final stage of the pyramid is the top. This is where the big ideas get kicked up to. These ideas require the product manager and the firm to make a big bet on where the world is headed. If your senior management agrees, these ideas are the ones that will create the breakthrough innovations for your product that everyone will be talking about.
What All Of This Means For You
Since you are responsible for the success of your product, you need to make sure that both you and your team keep innovating and making the product better and better. That means that you’re going to have to find ways to make innovation happen.
It turns out that there are more than one type of innovation. There are the big innovations that get all of the press and then there are the incremental innovations that are needed to allow the big innovations happen.
Product managers need to implement a framework that allows innovative ideas to be collected into a pyramid of innovation that will allow good ideas to be implemented no matter if they are small, medium, or breakthrough in size.
Innovation is a core requirement for every product – every product has a half-life and you need to be adding value to it in order to ensure its success. Use this deeper understanding of innovation to show your management and the market that your product is the most innovative.