Front End Innovation (FEI)
Embedding innovation into your organisation
We help create an innovation process that works for you. As researchers, designers and engineers, we love to create new things - and we don’t limit ourselves to products and services. We also love to create new ways of working, new methods, and new philosophies.
We know that having disconnected processes within an organisation can stifle innovation. We have partnered with many of our clients to help design new processes for innovation and new product development. However, we know that new processes shouldn’t just be for novelty or hype. To create a positive impact and truly work well, an innovation process needs to be honest about the needs and capabilities of your organisation while being based on the true fundamentals of design thinking: empathise with people, understand enabling technology, then defining, creating, prototyping, testing and most importantly - iterating. If these things are done well, the rest will follow. We don’t just hand over a process design. The best way to test and learn a new process is to experience it. We work with you, facilitating workshops, holding training sessions and then trialling and iterating new processes to collaboratively develop methods that provide a positive outcome for you and your organisation.
Planning product innovation
Too often new product development is a series of reactive and disjointed activities. We help our clients work more strategically, planning product, technology and IP roadmaps and portfolios that provide more robust and consistent growth.
We think each new product should act as a stepping stone to the next. We help create plans and platforms that become the foundational elements that enable targets, whether environmental or commercial, can be met in a series of controlled, manageable steps.
We use our technical and user knowledge to investigate when or whether technologies meet a user need and are suitable for your organisation. We help select suppliers and provide due diligence for the purchase of new products and technologies. We also have extensive experience of working within tightly constrained IP fields, providing strategic, management and technical services for FTO, patent circumnavigation and landscaping.
Too often new product development can be a series of reactive and disjointed activities
Product Strategy
Our experience in front end innovation (FEI) techniques combined with our insight, design and technical capabilities enable us to support in many different areas of product strategy, from exploring a new product category to providing due diligence services for the purchase of a new product, technology or piece of IP.
Over the last ten years, we have been completed over 100 strategic projects exploring, mapping and conceptualising opportunities in new markets and categories. Clients harness our ability to vision and interrogate these opportunities, ultimately inputting or creating a product road map and a plan of how to achieve it.
When clients are planning product portfolios, the answer can occasionally be to purchase or license existing products rather than developing something from scratch. DCA provides due diligence support to review and select new products for clients, providing an independent and expert view that leverages our extensive experience across a wide range of device types and development activities, from new product strategy to industrialisation and lifecycle support. Our multidisciplinary team of experts has the capability to provide in-depth understanding and insights into the device usability, design, engineering, evaluation, software, electronics, manufacture and assembly. In all of these skill areas, we have the specialist knowledge that is critical for successful device development, making us the perfect partner for due diligence.
Technology roadmapping
Many of our Clients need support planning technology development and investment decisions to achieve various business goals. They need to map multiple streams of technology which are necessary to create the required product platforms. To assist their planning we create a technology roadmap.
A technology roadmap is a living, strategic plan that is reviewed at least quarterly, outlining the technology initiatives and goals of a company over a specified period. It provides a visual representation of the current state of technology, future direction, and the steps needed to reach specific business objectives. The roadmap identifies the necessary resources, costs, and timelines required to achieve the desired outcome.
To start, our team work with our clients to gather data on marketing ambitions and initiatives, commercial and environmental goals to create the initial framework on the plan. New product initiatives are then explored which will deliver against these targets and goals followed by mapping the new technologies required to deliver the technologies. This then allows the R&D programmes, work streams and resources required to deliver the new technologies to be understood and integrated to the overall plan. Technology roadmaps are ‘living documents’. They are first created as draft sketches, and become increasingly detailed as they are reviewed, and continuously updated as the R&D work streams begin.
IP strategy
Intellectual property is a fundamental element in the creation of commercial success for most of our clients. Our clients engage our experienced team to provide strategic thinking and day-to-day assistance with the management of intellectual property rights. This can range from long-term, high-level strategy development to individual project focused work. It can involve support for patent circumnavigation or help to explore patent landscapes. Crucially our design teams can place the intellectual property needs of the project at the heart of their thinking from the very outset of planning the project, as well as during the creation of the product itself. Our innovations and creative work have helped our clients with over 3,900 patent applications and more than 1,700 granted patents worldwide since 2000.
In order to deliver the level of service that our clients demand, DCA has long-standing relationships with some of the world’s leading patent agencies and patent litigation specialists. Our experienced and knowledgeable staff can work directly with these specialists and your own experts to help minimise intellectual property risk and maximise your potential intellectual property advantage.
Synthesising existing data
We find the nuggets of insight in existing data that are truly important. If you are responsible for developing new products, you are probably standing in front of a mountain of information. Research reports, market analyses, technical data and latent knowledge hidden in different parts of your company all contain valuable information – but it doesn’t easily lead to action.
Rather than adding a new report to the pile, we can take your existing data, analyse it, and distil it into a coherent story focused on what knowledge is most important to help you make decisions and design new products. Where we see information is missing, we fill in the gaps in an agile way with our own investigations – stakeholder interviews, on-the-ground research and technical exploration
Testing and iterating future hypotheses
We believe in human-centred design. Products without the right user experience are destined to fail. That is why we have the capability to prototype the relevant experience of a product as fast as possible, to test it and learn how we can improve it. While learning with users, we can rapidly prototype new iterations of designs to put back into research fast.
We can help prototype any user experience from a toothbrush to a train at any stage of a project. From early ergonomic rigs to test shape, size and safety or harnessing the power of VR, AR and mixed reality to get initial experience feedback our combined expertise in user research and design means we can create stimulus which is optimised to answer the right question at the right time of an innovation process. Later in the development process, our ID and UX designers, engineers and workshop team can work together to prototype interactive ‘looks like, works like’ models that reflect the final user experience in incredible realism.
Helping our clients achieve success through great product design
