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Balancing Speed & Quality: Where R&D Should Pump the Brakes or Hit the Gas

Steve Jobs once said, “Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying no to all but the most crucial features.” As part of the I.D. product development team at Apple, I had the remarkable experience of observing this philosophy firsthand. I sat in on many design team meetings where new and innovative […]

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5 Critical Mistakes R&D Teams Make: Avoid Them with These Simple Practices

What could be more exciting than the development and launch of a new product?  The rush of the experience – grounded in the hope of unprecedented success. Legendary products like Apple AirPods, which captured 60% of the market in record time and the Apple Watch, which made Apple the world’s biggest watch manufacturer in 2018, […]

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How to Accelerate Your Engineering Builds (and Ensure You Get Parts That Fit)

There are very few parts that function on their own—almost every design requires multiple pieces to be joined in some way to create a final product. When was the last time you had something other than a bottle opener that was a single, functional part?  When designing for a multi-part engineering build, there are extra […]

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Real Hardware Engineers Code: How to Use Code to Maximize Efficiency in Solidworks, Reporting & More

Go, Go, Go—we’ve all heard the inspirational and aspirational desire of upper management to get it done, get it done right, and as always, get it done faster. One way to be more efficient as an engineer is to learn to code. In this blog post, I hope to help convince you to start coding […]

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Finite Element Analysis: How to Use Hooke’s Law to Dial in Simple FEAs

Any professional mechanical engineer knows that Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is an essential tool used to analyze stress (deflection, FOS, and more) in a design based on different loading conditions. A huge part of conducting FEA centers around research. When you start the process, you don’t yet know what you don’t know. You need to […]

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8 Tips to Maximize the Impact of Your Prototypes

You just finished the initial design of your product, and it looks great! Well, it looks great on your computer screen. So, you decide to make a prototype and see if your design looks and works as intended in real life. Odds are that the first prototype won’t meet all of your expectations. In fact, […]

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How to Conduct a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

In the product design world, it’s common to use a tool called a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to improve a design or process. FMEAs are commonly separated into two different categories, depending on their application: A Design FMEA (D-FMEA) is used in product design to identify possible design weaknesses and failure modes. A […]