With 440K Nest smoke detectors recalled at $160ea assuming a 1/10 manuf. cost = $7M loss for a 1st run launch. What if this happens to your firms flagship design? Here's what.
1. Plan ahead - for interactions between manufacturing partners, logistics, and facing call centers, websites, etc. so that customers are not let out in the dark as to next steps as well as the legal teams and ramifications from possible legal actions.
2. Respond quickly - assembling the necessary team as fast as possible and directly addressing customer, manufacturer and media allows for engineering to begin the process of fixing, retrofitting and of removal of the product from the market
3. Acknowledge it - by working directly with consumers, the media and internal champions to solve issues before they spiral beyond repair.
4. Turn the corner - by getting product back into the hands of key customers, media,and merchants who can keep the flow of the newly adjusted product in the hands of those who product champions.
The value of design, design thinking, design disruption is more than 250% of invested capital. How? R&D and Innovation pipe-lining. But more, good design. Here's how.
In a recent DMI - Design Management Institute article, after an extensive study of 75 US firms over a 10yr period, 15 firms employed design centric thinking which lead to an increase in stock price by more than 250% above firms that did not employ design specific new product development models. Further we see the likes of design investment strategies being followed by the VC community in Will the Next Zuckerberg Be a Designer, not a Hacker? per the recent MIT Review Article and even more impressive is the existence of Khosla Ventures Designer Fund proving the maker and inventor channels are alive. When design thinking, new product development, engineering and entrepreneurship come together, firms succeed. Period.
Medical devices are a notoriously expensive to design and especially launch but when Debby Elnatan and the team at Firefly designed the Upsee, it upended the wheelchair industry. Here's how she did it:
Innovation requires rule breaking and in the case of the design of the Upsee, the indications are clear: Dr's suggested that Debby's child not walk or crawl. Physical Therapists suggested she not even move her child. In this case the mother of invention became a literal reality during the creation of the device throughout the years that Debbie perfected the device. Profiled on US national and international television the design of the device, branding, research and manufacturing clearly illustrates that necessity is in fact the mother not of invention but of innovation. Look out wheelchair industry.
