A Case for Onsite Services: The Flexibility and Affordability of Direct Product Development
Kaleidoscope Innovation realized early in its business journey that the individuals, organizations and companies they worked with could benefit from insights, design and development services through one of two different channels: consultancy and onsite services. This case study examines the onsite services side of the business and the benefits it brings to the firm’s partners.
Why Onsite?
Though Kaleidoscope Innovation started as a product development consultancy, it became evident that the company could complement their robust consultancy-style offerings with assistance for business partners seeking onsite services. When talking with business partners, Kaleidoscope discovered a common thread: many wanted or needed additional personnel to work in teams on projects but were constrained by headcount limitations or budget. These partners needed a flexible solution that would allow them to expand or augment the size and specialized skills of their teams when needed. To fill this need, Kaleidoscope expanded its product development business to offer onsite services.
Services Offered
Similar to the consultancy side of the business, Kaleidoscope’s onsite placement division provides companies with services across the product development spectrum. The onsite services placement team connects companies with the expertise they need—skilled designers, engineers, digital modelers, animators, project managers, technical writers, design researchers and more. Because the consultancy side of the business also comprises professionals working in these specialized fields, Kaleidoscope Innovation knows what to look for when connecting business partners with talent for their teams.
How It Works
Case
As an example, a leading medical manufacturer identifies what resources they are seeking, such as an industrial designer for their projects. The business partner needs this industrial designer to work onsite as part of its team, but the company is not in a position to create a full-time, long-term position. This could be for any number of reasons, from headcount constraints, to budget, to a desire for low-risk entry. Given any one of these issues, Kaleidoscope Innovation can offer a creative, low-risk, high-return solution. Kaleidoscope’s onsite placement services team handles the process of finding and acquiring an experienced industrial designer. Kaleidoscope Innovation hires that person as a Kaleidoscope employee who works onsite at the partner’s business for the desired length of time. The partner can keep the employee onsite or cease using the person’s services as needed. Kaleidoscope takes responsibility for the HR implications. The business partner simply pays a monthly fee to Kaleidoscope for the industrial designer’s services. “When it comes to building relationships, we care about our employees and our partners,” says Joe Campbell, Recruiting Account Manager. “This is more than a placement opportunity. This is one person’s career and another person’s project.” When an onsite project is completed, the employee may be assigned to another onsite project or work at the consultancy. Dave Banks, who leads Kaleidoscope’s marketing team, is one example of a Kaleidoscope employee who started work in the onsite placement division and transitioned back into the consultancy. “Kaleidoscope is always looking for top talent,” says Banks. “We hire high-caliber, quality people whether it’s onsite or in-house, and this allows an easy transition for someone to move between the two. Often, our business partners become so happy with the people that Kaleidoscope places, they hire them full-time.”
Value For Businesses
Committed to improving the human experience through meaningful innovation, Onsite Services from Kaleidoscope Innovation flex to solve problems, filling the gaps with qualified people.
Innovation Leadership & How to Build the Ideal Innovation Team
In this article about innovation leadership and the ideal innovation team, Kaleidoscope VP of R&D, Medical, Michael Clem DVM, MS examines the functional and cross-functional expertise needed to drive the best innovation resources to turn creative ideas into quality products that benefit consumers.
People often think of Thomas Edison when they think of innovation. This focus on the single inventor can sometimes give the wrong impression of how successful innovations take place. In reality, Edison surrounded himself with teams of creative individuals. It has been said that innovation is a team sport, requiring teamwork.
But how do you approach staffing your ideal team to drive innovation in your company?
Perhaps the most important aspect of innovation leadership and building the ideal innovation team is to foster cross-functionality. Really focus on getting people who serve specific functions in the team, but who also have a shared vision and shared incentives. This ideal innovation team is not just assigned to a common project, not just sitting together. The ideal innovation team is really working together and pushing boundaries to take on additional roles outside of their areas of specialization.
From a functional expertise perspective, here are the essential functions or team members:
Engineering
Engineers bring technical expertise in product design and development to the team. Over time, I came to broadly characterize two types of engineers as critical to successful development. Both types have their own inherent strengths and are equally valuable.
"Idea" Engineers
These are the creative “inventive engineers” who are always coming up with new ideas. These individuals are extremely important to have on the team, but often hard to keep focused. They like to move on to the next challenge or exciting problem to solve. These out-of-the-box thinkers come up with new solutions to break new ground.
"Closer" Engineers These are the heavy lifters who are needed to follow through to make the big, creative ideas become a reality. They work out the problems, build the prototypes and run the tests. They are essential to getting to final designs that can be manufactured. This is certainly not to say that these individuals are not creative or that they do not also come up with great ideas. They just tend to excel in dotting the “i’s” and crossing the “t’s” required to advance a radical idea.
These team members capture opportunities as defined by Thomas Edison when he said, “Opportunity is missed by most people, because it shows up dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
Occasionally, someone will find an individual engineer who embodies both characteristics, but in my experience, most people excel in one direction or the other.
CAD Design
Fifteen years ago, it was not the norm for engineers to do their own CAD. However, the digital design world has evolved and this is no longer the case. With that said, having a dedicated CAD designer on the team can free engineers to concentrate on other tasks. Otherwise, engineers would be devoting “screen time” to refining concept design for rapid prototyping. In many instances, a seasoned CAD designer can fulfill the role of the “closer” or heavy-lifting engineer. They will build models, test and refine designs for manufacturing.
Industrial Design
Industrial Design is an extremely valuable skill to have at all stages of concept development. Industrial designers bring the Design Thinking process to life. Beginning with understanding customer needs, translating insights into concept design, and integrating human factors into usability, their work is essential. Good industrial design work isn’t possible when the designers are brought in at the end to “make it look good.” It must be incorporated from the beginning of the process.
Marketing/Business
Early in the process, the team needs to be thinking about the market and whether their ideas would fit in the current market environment. Marketers and business people know what sells and how to make the case for the product. In many companies, they often drive a project and should always be included in discussions and planning from the outset.
“Hard work is still wasted on features that don’t make the marketing headlines,” says GV Design Partner Jake Knapp in an article on product design and marketing. “Instead of the icing on the cake, I like to think of marketing as the sugar in the batter. You’ve got to get it in before the cake gets baked.”
Clinical
In medical device design and development, the team should include an expert with in-depth clinical understanding. This is often the end-user physician. In addition to physicians though, it is crucial that the team also consider inputs from the entire healthcare ecosystem. This includes personnel who may be involved in the purchase, such as the value-analysis committee. (Learn more about the essential role of a value analysis committee.) Also the project needs to consider those involved in the preparation or use of the final product, such as technicians and nursing staff. This clinical knowledge may come from an individual clinician or a physician advisory panel, augmented by formal usability and concept research with users.
Support Functions
In an innovation setting, there will need to be additional support functions. Some of these important roles might be contracted from the outside, depending on the size of the organization. These roles include legal advisors, HR professionals, finance professionals, IT professionals, regulatory affairs, quality and operations management professionals.
Leadership
Ideally, the team leader should come from one of the functional roles on the team, engineering, marketing or design. The team leader serves as the main point of contact with management and other entities that need to be engaged to keep the project moving forward, and they must be able to recruit.
With the team leader also playing a functional role on the team. They are more like a “Player Coach,” providing direction while making meaningful contributions to the advancement of the project. At the same time, every member of a high performance innovation team needs to be a leader in his or her own right.
Transitional Innovation Leadership In this model, leadership may be transitional. Marketing and Industrial Design may lead the early stages of the project. For example, in the phases of understanding the customer needs, conducting market research and developing insights that shape the work. Later, leadership may transition to Engineering and Design leading during the ideation and concept development phases. At that time, Marketing then focuses on developing the business case for moving forward. With concepts in hand, leadership may transition back to Marketing for final validation research, pricing and launch planning.
Regardless of which function is taking the lead for a project phase, the best innovation comes when other functions are included throughout. This helps everyone to better understand what needs to be done from a big picture perspective. This also helps teams feel more invested in the outcome as well. Cross functional teams mean getting rid of information silos and opening communication.
Hot Teams
These ideal innovation teams can also be thought of as “hot teams.” These embody the idea of a cohesive group, working well together. Here the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The ideal innovation team does not need people who can only work in their specific areas of expertise, but who exhibit cross-functionality. People who don’t fear trying new roles. These individuals possess certain characteristics, such as their abilities to work together as a team. They also use their leadership skills to advance the work before them, take directives from management and embrace a fluctuating team structure.
They should also possess the tact and ability to navigate corporate processes to accomplish their team’s goals. But, be highly focused on reaching these relevant milestones in line with the end objective(s).
All things considered, ideal innovation teams need to have the right combination of skill sets, and must be willing to work collaboratively.
For those interested in learning more about how to form the ideal innovation team, I have written an e-book with input from my innovation-minded colleagues at Kaleidoscope that is free and available for download here. In the Ships and Castles Model I describe details on how to navigate front-end innovation efforts while fortifying an existing product line.
Ideal Innovation Team Sources
“Rapid Team Learning: Lessons from Team New Zealand America’s Cup Campaign,”
by Kambiz Maani + Campbell Benton
Ships and Castles Model: 7 Steps for Fortifying Your Base While Navigating Front-End Navigation
Clinical, Technical, Commercial and Organizational Considerations
Over the course of my 25 years working on and leading teams engaged in medical device development, I have experienced a variety of approaches to staffing the ideal innovation team.
In Part 1 of this series, I described a “functional approach” based on key technical skills team members should possess. Alternatively, in this section I describe a leaner approach based on critical categories of thinking required for medical device development.
In a lean startup environment, you can’t always access or afford all of the specific skills you might desire. At the same time, you do need to ensure your team is prepared to address the clinical, technical and commercial considerations inherent in developing medical product innovations. Depending on your organization’s size, the team may also need to be prepared to address organizational variables.
Building a team to address the clinical, technical, commercial and organizational considerations of product development requires a different way of looking at the individuals you choose. Rather than focusing on a person’s primary technical skill (i.e. engineering, design, marketing), identify team members who have the breadth of experiences necessary to successfully navigate the requirements in each category of thinking. From my experience, these individuals can come from various technical backgrounds.
Let’s look at the role each category plays in medical product innovation.
Clinical Considerations
In medical device development, a deep understanding of the users and clinical problem is critical to developing successful solutions. For instance, the concept development team must understand the problem, anatomy, physiology, pathology, users, use environment and so on.
Someone on the team needs to develop this multilayered understanding. This allows the team to represent patients, physicians, other healthcare professionals and key stakeholders who will benefit from the solution.
Depending on their training and backgrounds, this in-depth clinical knowledge might be a stretch for some. But with diligent observational research, relationships with consulting subject matter experts and secondary research, this knowledge can (and must) be integrated into the team. A good scientific or clinical advisory group, composed of relevant subject matter experts, can be invaluable.
Although this clinical understanding speaks specifically to medical device development, it has an equally critical corollary in any field of innovative product development. Simply foster a deep understanding of the end users and the job(s) they are trying to accomplish.
Some methods and tools that can help develop this knowledge include:
Ethnography and customer observation
Regulatory assessments
Procedure maps
Clinical stakeholder assessment
Commercial Considerations
Much like fostering an understanding of clinical considerations in your team members, integrating commercial considerations is highly important. Even if your innovation team is staffed exclusively with engineers or individuals with technical backgrounds, someone on the team needs to be ready and able to put on a business thinking hat. Ideally, this individual would come from a business or marketing background or have additional experience in these fields.
Examples of commercial considerations the team should address include:
Customer value proposition
Claims exploration
Competitive assessment
Business plan development
Innovation teams that fail to incorporate these commercial considerations in developing their solutions run the risk of creating wonderful technical solutions that the market will not embrace for any number of reasons.
Tools to help make sure the innovation team addresses these considerations include:
Why Using an End-to-End Product Development Firm Can Benefit Your Business (Even If You Only Need One Service)
Even if you are just looking to outsource one particular service (such as human factors, industrial design, engineering, software development, etc.) for your project, working with a full-service product development firm for said service can provide immense benefits to your business and project. Here are a few key reasons why:
01 | Holistic Understanding of the User-Centered Design Process
Employees at an end-to-end product development firm have gained additional perspectives into the user-centered design process from team members in other functional areas. This often informs their own processes for product development, and enables them to keep key considerations from other departments in mind as they themselves iterate on your project. This is especially true when the firm is a small- to medium-sized business because there is more likely to be intermingling of employees, rather than siloed departments of functional service areas.
02 | Prioritization of Cross-Functional Collaboration
When a business chooses to work with a full-service product development firm, the individuals they are hiring for their project are integrated with people in different functional service areas on a day-to-day basis. Their colleagues and internal team members for other projects span different roles in the product development process. Because of this, they are used to working and collaborating with people who have different viewpoints than themselves. Working with people who understand different stakeholder values can make for a more pleasant overall experience and can produce better results for the user and client.
03 | Greater Efficiency for Clients
When clients approach a firm that is strictly a design firm, for instance, and later decide they require engineering support for their project, they need to then utilize an additional firm. This means more time and opportunity cost in exploring possible firms and finding a reliable partner, approving a new supplier, signing an MSA (master service agreement) or NDA (non-disclosure agreement), explaining the project to a new group and potentially connecting them with the other firm to move the project along. This time and hassle is greatly reduced when starting with a full-service product development firm from the beginning. While a new phase may need to be discussed and different team members may need to be brought up to speed, much of the work would ramp up far more quickly and efficiently with teammates from the same company you have already trusted to achieve your project objectives.
04 | Retention of Proprietary Information by Less Companies (Risk Reduction)
If a business decides to outsource a different service for their current project (similar to point #3) or outsource various services for other projects down the line, using a full-service product development firm allows them to disclose their proprietary project information to less companies and potentially less people – reducing risk.
Conclusion
These are just a few reasons why using a full-service product development firm can benefit your business and help you achieve greater results for your project. Kaleidoscope Innovation is one such end-to-end product development firm. For over 30 years clients have partnered with Kaleidoscope to improve the human experience. Offering both consultancy-style and onsite services, Kaleidoscope provides a full breadth of disciplines to meet their partners where needed, including: Insights & Human Factors, Medical Affairs, Industrial Design & User Experience Design, Engineering, Visualization and Software Development. To connect with our team, please fill out the form on our contact page or connect with a member of our team directly.
