Key product design & development steps for your new product or idea.

•Step 1
Come up with a great new idea for something that can be marketed. For instance, you may have an idea for a new watch face, or an idea for how peanut butter could be smoother.

•Step 2
Make sure your idea can become either an actual product or design, or a process. If you have an idea for a new watch face, this would be a design. If you have an idea for making peanut butter smoother, you could develop a process.

•Step 3
Determine the steps for getting your idea from an idea to the product/design or process. If you are going to design a new watch face, you would want to draw up the design on paper of what the design would look like and what materials would be used. To develop smoother peanut butter, you would write the steps involved in the process, and what ingredients and supplies would be needed.

•Step 4
Obtain intellectual property rights over the process or design. Once you have determined what it will take to get your idea to a design or product, you are ready to get legal rights over it. This is an important step because it will protect others from copying your efforts and taking the credit (and making the money for it!)

•Step 5
Intellectual property rights are either patents, trademarks or copyrights. If you have an idea for a new song, you would write out the words and record the music, and then submit both to get a music copyright. If you have a new process, you would get a patent for the process. Trademarks are symbols that can only be used by the owner of the trademark, such as the McDonald’s logo.

•Step 6
Do some research on the product or process. This should include a manufacturing cost study and a market study. These will be needed for you to determine if the product can sell at a profit, and to present to the potential licensee or buyer of the product or intellectual property rights in the process. A product design group such as pillar product design can assist clients in this realm determining the over-all cost of good.

•Step 7
Make a prototype of the product or design. If it’s a new watch face, make one. If it’s a process, use the process to make the product, like the smoother peanut butter. You will need this to present to the licensee/ buyer as well.

•Step 8
Come up with a presentation package for your product or process. You want to have everything packaged together and professional before you present it to the buyer or licensee. The package should include in an easy to read format the studies done, and should also include the prototype.

•Step 9
Decide how you will make money with the product or process. You will either sell the rights to the intellectual property or grant the company a license to use them. If you have a product, you can either make the product yourself and sell it to a company to market, or you can sell them the patent on the product and the process of how to make it so the company can make the product themselves.

•Step 10
Find a buyer or licensee and sell your amazing idea!