When Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest for the first time in 1953, they didn’t just take a giant leap for the top. Rather, they conquered the 8000 meter giant in a series of 10 centimetre steps with manageable milestones along the way.

An R&D analogy is a company who had spent years developing a new biopsy product in which a rotating blade advanced over a needle used as an anchor. The samples were small and unreliable, so customers were losing confidence. They had tried a bigger motor, sharper blade, different shape, but to no avail. Generation 4 was on the market but still too few customers.

Instead of leaping immediately for a whole new design, we broke the challenge down into a series of steps. How strong is the anchor force? How big is the cutting force? Which is larger? These could be measured simply on a standard piece of laboratory apparatus called a tensometer. When the graph was plotted, we could see that the cutting force was far greater than the anchor force, so the device was just recoiling every time it fired.

So the next steps were: how can I make the cutting force smaller? How can I make the anchor force larger?

Breaking down the problem into steps like this means you then spend your time solving the right problem. It might feel that pausing to do a sequence of scientific experiments adds time compared to aiming straight for the whole answer, but in reality it is often possible to find a much quicker route to success. If every step is in the right direction, you’ll arrive at the answer. But if you spend time solving the wrong problem, no matter how elegantly, you get nowhere.

This is an approach we’ve done for our clients many times over, and the savings can often be measured in years.

Please contact Keith Turner if you think we could help you or if you would like to be alerted to the next strategy.

There’s a great quote by Thomas Edison when asked if he felt like a failure because of all his failed attempts to invent the electric light bulb. “Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.”

And not one of those 9,000 prototypes was made on a production line.

A situation that our clients commonly find themselves in goes a bit like this. “Yes, I know it’s not quite working yet but time is running out before the product launch next April and so we have to commission the tooling now. Management aren’t willing to let the launch date slip.”

It brings to mind a medical project in which the disposable part had been pushed through to injection moulding. The trouble was that revisions to the design were still being made. It was possible to modify the tool, but each time that happened, it took six weeks to get the next parts released before they could be tested.

Earlier in the same project, we had been prototyping the disposable component on our CNC mill. You could do a test, modify the CAD, set the mill running overnight and test the next iteration the next day.

Short development cycles demand flexibility, and for this it helps to delay tooling until you know the design works in all respects except for those specifically dependent on tooled properties. Even if you need 100 parts for a clinical evaluation, perhaps they can be machined? It might cost $10,000 and some planning ahead in validation, but that’s child’s play compared with a 12 month delay to a multi-million dollar programme.

There’s a whole suite of prototyping methods available today, such as additive methods (SLA, 3D printing, SLS, vacuum casting…) and subtractive methods (machining, laser cutting, EDM…), not to mention various ways of sealing, bending and so on.

In the next article we look at how to break down a daunting, complex problem into a series of manageable steps.

Please contact Keith Turner if you think we could help you or if you would like to be alerted to the next strategy.