We can help you innovate at the earliest, "pre-natal" stages of idea/product development. It's during these very earliest stages, before the idea has been "conformed" to the style and capabilities of your organization, where the greatest opportunity for real innovation exists.

Idea Development

We apply our creativity, expertise, diverse experience and business savvy to flesh out the nature of the problems you are trying to address and then develop creative and proprietary solutions.

Years of working with and within innovative companies have taught us that expertise is often the enemy of innovation. The instant answers that come from years of experience stop the search too soon, leaving better solutions for someone else to find. Many companies have unwittingly evolved cultures that don't give full consideration to contrarian views nor tap the wealth of innovation available from close collaboration with customers, suppliers and channel partners.

We bring our breadth of experience and willingness to challenge the status quo to any organization looking to grow through innovation. Whether you've encountered a problem or market opportunity that's outside your core competencies or within it, we can help you reduce uncertainty and delays and maximize the return on your development efforts.

Rapid Prototyping

Nothing speeds innovation like prototyping. Whether it's a service, process, software or hardware, your ability to rapidly realize the major conceptual elements of an idea is crucial to reducing your company's development risks. Analyzing an idea to death in meetings is a surefire way to sink it, and a great deal of your company's intellectual and real capital as well. The power of a prototype to elicit new ideas, promote cross functional collaboration and expose flaws is unsurpassed.

We've created prototypes for investor presentations, market research, team building, user interface analysis, product development, manufacturing assessment and numerous other purposes. We can prototype for you, with you, or help you develop or enhance your own internal prototyping capabilities. Nothing will help your organization innovate more successfully than having a vibrant prototying capability. The rapid and efficient realization of prototypes is your company's best way to minimze the risks and maximize the returns on your innovation investment.

Our hardware prototyping abilities range from paper and duct tape to full blown microprocessor controlled systems with wireless communications. Our hardware knowledge base includes:

• Physical modeling
• User centered design
• Embedded development using 8/16/32 bit processors (ARM, PIC, AVR, MOT, DSP)
• Low power electronics
• Battery powered systems
• Wired communications (POTS, Ethernet, RS-232/485, USB)
• Wired and wireless communications (RF and optical)
• Digital imaging (CCD)
• Medical instrumentation
• Data logging
• RFID/Barcode
• Thermal printing

Our software and user interface prototying abilities range from paper sketch "screens" to "PowerPoint protos" to fully functional embedded, PC and Internet based systems. Our software knowledge base includes:

• GUI design/test (storyboard to functional via paper, PowerPoint, VB, C and Web)
• Embedded programming of 8/16/32 bit microprocessors (assembly and C)
• PC programming (Mac OS, Windows, Linux, C, C#, Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applciations)
• Digital signal processing
• Embedded real-time systems (proprietary, uC/OS-II, QNX)
• Communications protocols (RS-232, USB, TCP/IP, IrDA)
• Web development (HTML, PHP, XML, ASP, CSS)

Product Design

Although our primary focus is assisting in the early stages of product’s design, we occasionally stay involved with a project throughout its development in situations where it is determined that our ongoing involvement offers true value.

If you want some outside assistance with innovation, please contact us to schedule a free consultation.