What we do:
Talks & Mentoring
Interactive presentations are the most straight forward way of delivering our experience and knowledge. Depending on what type of engagement you’re looking for, we can arrange to do a whirl wind, half hour talk, through to a full on, two day course.
The focus can be on one or two key topics (the 20 minute to half hour timeslots); in an hour we can cover the basics across a much broader range or concentrate on one or two key topics; A deep dive can take from a couple of hours through to a couple of days, depending on the number of topics. The full gamut of all things R&D - that takes a while!
Pre-Patent Prep
How to prepare to get the most value out of your time with a patent lawyer. Their time is expensive. We can give you some background and explain the ‘game’ so you can skip some of the prelims to get the most bang for your buck! Also some tips on optimising ‘prior art’ searches and responding to examiner’s objections.
‘Incremental’ isn’t a dirty word
Some different approaches to RD&D. There’s often a bit of gambling involved in deciding which approach to take. Are you feeling lucky?
More than Gantt charts
Tricks and tips for running a successful R&D project. Some important fundamentals that are often overlooked and some advanced pointers.
I’m going to need more hands and brains
Some ideas on how to build and wrangle an R&D team. It’s not your normal commercial team.
Automation, Modelling and AI
We have some seemingly unorthodox but very pragmatic ideas when it comes to AI, modelling and more generally, automation. Based on decades of experience.
Hardware vs software
A lot of the advice we offer is generic, especially on topics like Real World project management and team building. However, there's a few key topics that we concentrate on that speak loudest in hardware development.
Hardware start-ups have the worst odds of becoming successful. There, we've said it. Overall 90% of start-ups fail, that gets out to over 95% if you're running a hardware gig. So why is it harder for hardware? Short answer is that it's harder to upscale hardware than software (either as a pure app or SaaS). Once you've cut some good code, software scale up is comparatively easy. That's not typically the case for hardware. Either physically upscaling the physical dimensions of the device or increasing production quantities… and often both can cause major issues. Some easy examples: Something that might have been stiff enough at a small scale, starts to bend and flex if you make it bigger out of the same material. Difficulty upscaling quantities? Ask Tesla about ramping up the Model 3 production... (and they're no mugs - it can be seriously difficult!)
We can help with that.
VC’s – Valuable Contributors or…
Understanding the beast, why they are the way they are, how they typically think, and some ideas about how best to engage with them.