Once we’ve found a potential business opportunity, an idea we think may have a market, the next thing we need is a vision. As engineers and designers, our instinct is to go right to a solution and prototype, and skip the vision. But here at Novation Tech, we take the time to do it right and look into the future to define our vision.
That’s right, we’re time travelers. Well, not exactly time travelers, but we try to envision how our idea might come to life in the future. We try to imagine in great detail, the final product. The look. The feel. As they say in design school – the form, fit and function.
We try to imagine how our customers might use our product, what functions it must perform, and how well it must perform its functions. We don’t worry about how we can make it happen yet; for the time being we assume we build it to do anything we need.
One valuable exercise is to design a one page advertisement for your future product. A sketch, a description of the product, a list of its capabilities, some specifications, and anything else you might look for if you were going to buy the product. It is a great way to define your vision.
Since you now have an idea and a vision, in the next entry we’ll discuss how you get from idea to vision.
Several readers have asked how we get our ideas for products. We have several creative minds working on our team, each with their own interests and views. If left on their own, the ideas and projects would wander wildly. They would be fun and interesting – two of our goals – but we are a business and need to ensure that our research and development resources are spent wisely. So how do we herd this bunch of cats?
erson to have the idea. For example, you might have had a great idea for an invention months ago, but for one reason or another, you did not file for the patent yet. If at a later date, another person independently had the same or similar idea, but put in an application before you did, the law will favor them. Even though you had the idea first. Wow, it seems so unfair…whoever gets to the patent office first wins.
The Novation gizmos are all items that we designed for ourselves ‘cause we wanted them. They work and are fun and useful, but because we are using them ourselves, they are all handmade prototypes and not currently designed as consumer products. To share them with you, we need to:
at Novation spent the weekend working on (and playing with) 
have to do with electronic gizmos? Sometimes the cats here at Novation develop devices just because they are curious. Dance Zone™ is a case in point. We’re working on the facts that 1) dancing is better exercise than walking, 2) dancing makes people happy, and 3) people cannot resist dancing to some songs. We wondered what would happen if we made sections of walkways into “dancing only” zones. So we grabbed some infrared distance sensors, and Arduino, a couple of speakers and our favorite MP3 music clips. Poof…there you have it–a portable dance zone. We’re testing it out now on a college campus, and will make it available to you once it is perfect. (yes, of course we will show you some video clips…coming soon!)
For the last few years we’ve been designing and building wild and wonderful devices for ourselves for various purposes…from fun electronic shoes, electronic basketball backboards and dance walking devices, to sophisticated instrumentation packages for machinery diagnosis and weather measurement. We were usually driven by curiosity–how will people react to pedestrian zones where they must dance? (answer: they laugh…a lot) Will the place kicker’s field goal attempt be knocked down by the wind? (answer: for sure) Can we make a portable airport moving sidewalk? (answer: uh huh, and it’s amazing) But sometimes we had specific needs that drove us to develop the devices–projects for sports broadcasters, industry leaders and government R&D. In all cases, we put a lot of time and thought into the devices, worked out the kinks, and thought they might be useful to many others around the world for fun and profit.