It’s been just over 2 years now since the MyFan project won LiveEdge 2008 and started the Haiku
ceiling fan on its journey to market (www.haikufan.com).
ceiling fan on its journey to market (www.haikufan.com). Two years may seem like a long time, but developing a design for a new generation of consumer durable appliances completely through to market is a big project! As of February 2008 I estimated this would take about a year’s work for a team of 5 engineers & designers, covering electromagnetics, electronics, embedded software, mechanical & industrial design work, spread over 2 calendar years. That’s 10,000 hours of R&D! At that point it looked like a mountain, but the way to climb a mountain is one step at a time.
Firstly we had to plan carefully to maximize use of the prize money. Electronics, software, electromagnetics and initial mechanical design could be done in house, allowing us to engage consultants for detailed mechanical and industrial design, and to source rapid prototype components to validate our designs. We knew we wouldn’t get a product to market within the 1 year prize allocation timeframe, so we decided to do targeted market research instead of advertising and promotions, and allocated the balance to engaging patent & trademark attorneys to build our IP portfolio.
Managing all the above involves writing a lot of initial documentation, specifications and design briefs in order to find and assess which consultants to use. This isn’t anything like as much fun as just diving in and building things, but it is critical to find the right partners to collaborate with and to clearly communicate your goals, timeframes and budgets in order to achieve a good result. For an unknown company the LiveEdge win was pivotal at this stage in gaining credibility with established consultants. The fun part of this was piecing together a distributed collaborative development project with teams in the UK, Beijing, Singapore and Malaysia.
The collaborative approach, as encouraged by Premier Farnell’s Element-14 forum, is a relatively new approach to product development which has even attracted the attention of the Harvard Business School. A 2007 HBS paper entitled “Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage” (Alan MacCormack et al) summarizes it as:
“Traditional approaches, based on the assumption that the creation and pursuit of new ideas is best accomplished by a centralized and collocated R&D team, are rapidly becoming outdated. Instead, innovations are increasingly brought to the market by networks of firms, selected for their unique capabilities, and operating in a coordinated manner. This new model demands that firms develop different skills, in particular, the ability to collaborate with partners to achieve superior innovation performance.”
After getting the paperwork out of the way it was back to the lab to validate and continually refine our motor, electronics and software designs. Prototyping motors and fan blades is time consuming and we went through 7 models before we were finished. We also had to build an in-house airflow test rig to verify performance, but by mid 2008 we had prototypes under test that achieved the desired performance and allowed us to freeze key dimensions for industrial design phase.
The bulk of the industrial design was completed by e.o 2008. We ran two design projects in parallel with different consultants. Kotuku was handled by a local team so we could keep close tabs on it; Satori was handled by a joint team in UK & Beijing who worked largely independently. In the end we were delighted with the results and decided to proceed with both models.
At this stage we were able to build full scale models of fans using rapid prototype (RP) parts. Not too many though – Kotuku RP blades alone cost USD500.00 each!
Production tooling began in early 2009. Again the LiveEdge win was pivotal in securing the funding and support necessary from our manufacturing partners to bring this expensive part of the project through to completion. This part is both exciting, as the design which started out a dream starts to assemble itself before your eyes, and nerve wracking as part designs move from CAD to steel and the costs of correcting errors mounts into the $1000’s.
In mid-2009 we were able to validate our in-house airflow tests with a production fan tested at an EPA Energy Star approved ceiling fan test facility and verified that our in-house results were within 2% of the final measurements. These tests showed that Kotuku K3150-A0 model to be more efficient than any other ceiling fan listed on the EPA EnergyStar database with performance figures 400-600% better than EnergyStar requirements. We believe it may currently be the most efficient ceiling fan in the world.
In the background on-going software development & testing was underway to migrate from the basic functionality required for simple performance testing to full featured stable production code.
In late 2009 our first products were ready for approval testing to IEC standards. Approvals is probably the least favorite part of any product development, however careful planning in the design stage allowed us to clear this final barrier to market with minimal modifications required.
Two years on from our LiveEDGE win and we now have fully approved production models ready for launch and a pipeline of new models and variations to follow. Initial customer feedback has been extremely positive, we have secured our first significant project orders and started deliveries to early customers.
Watch this space for updates as we release more products and to track our progress. Finally, a big vote of thanks to Premier Farnell and LiveEDGE for making it all possible.