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Explore innovation and design best practices - these are our thoughts, would love to hear yours too.

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Connie Tran
January 27, 2021

How to Perform a Competitive Brand Analysis

What is a Competitive Brand Analysis, why is it important, and how do you perform one? Performing a Competitive Brand Analysis is the first crucial step in developing and executing upon a solid brand strategy. A successful brand can’t be designed within a vacuum. A Competitive Brand Analysis takes into account several dimensions of your competitors’ branding to provide the context you need to develop your own brand. Only by knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors can you develop a brand that is truly differentiated.

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The Trig Team
August 18, 2020

How do you design a survey to support product development?

Surveys are a powerful tool to efficiently test your assumptions and deepen your knowledge about your target customers. Typically, a survey is custom-designed to gain the critical information needed to optimize the design of new product features, test brand awareness, and understand what pricing is reasonable for the market.

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Kelly Harrigan
August 12, 2020

How Do You Improve Creative Performance?

Creative team performance is essential to successful innovation programs yet groups are inferior to individuals for creative performance, both in quality and quantity of ideas. So, how do we reverse the natural dynamic of individual creative performance being greater than that of the team, when the team has to perform better for the sake of the company’s success?

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Kelly Harrigan
Andrew DiMeo
Tyler Hagler
August 10, 2020

How do I align product teams around a shared vision?

Product managers often struggle to get functional teams from engineering, marketing, sales, and finance aligned on a shared vision. Levels of Alignment is a framework for building team alignment around a product vision.

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Kelly Harrigan
August 4, 2020

How Many People Will Adopt Your Product?

The ATAR forecast model estimates the percent of sales based on a given market size. We use this technique to assess potential success of a new product or service, which helps clients make smarter choices during uncertainty.

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Kelly Harrigan
Tyler Hagler
August 3, 2020

Virtual Design Thinking Workshops

DON'T run a virtual design thinking workshop the same way as an in-person session. The Trig team has developed a series of tools and frameworks to help virtual teams outperform in-person creative teams.

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Andrew DiMeo
March 23, 2020

Is it too early to start Design History File Ready Ideation?

It’s never too early to start capturing design history, aka, the building blocks for that Trace Matrix. Even at the earliest stages of a clinician and engineer talking together about potential problems…

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Tyler Hagler
March 11, 2020

How do you work remotely effectively and avoid distractions?

While working remotely has some trade-offs, we have found many benefits over working in a centralized office environment. During a recent weekly virtual Trig Team meeting, we posed the question during the last five minutes in our lightning round close-out conversation.

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Andrew DiMeo
Tyler Hagler
October 7, 2019

What is Human Factors Engineering?

Human Factors Engineering (HFE) can be a complex subject, it is however also one of common sense. HFE has many names including ergonomics, human engineering, engineering psychology, and human factors psychology to name a few.

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Tyler Hagler
August 8, 2019

What is Concept Validation Testing?

Screen and validate new ideas in the marketplace using the Trig concept validation testing methodology. When push comes to shove, most companies don't lack for ideas of new products. The ability to prioritize and pick the winners is the most essential piece of the puzzle.

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The Trig Team
July 16, 2019

Did Steve Jobs do Market Research?

In his book Antifragile, Nicholas Nassim Taleb states the following: ”The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups – those based on asking people what they want – and following his own imagination, his modus was that people don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.” This is an out-of-context sound bite.

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Andrew DiMeo
July 3, 2019

How much does it cost to launch a medical device company?

The total investment to launch a medical device company can be $2MM to $5MM from proof of concept to FDA clearance. This assumes the device pathway is limited to a US-only launch for a straightforward Class 2 device with 510(k) pathway.

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The Trig Team
May 15, 2019

How much does it cost to patent an idea?

It is not enough to simply patent an idea; it must first be reduced to practice with sufficient detail to show how it would work to the average person who works in your domain of knowledge or industry.

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Andrew DiMeo
April 9, 2019

Prototyping - Why / What / How

Once we know “Why” we want to build a prototype, or multiple types of prototypes, let’s consider “What” kinds of prototypes there are. Between Feedback, Resolution, Dimension, Cost, and Speed there are a seemingly infinite number of options. Here are some of the more common types of prototypes

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Andrew DiMeo
March 18, 2019

Need Statements vs. Challenge Statements - What's the Difference?

The difference between Need Statements and Challenge Statements. For the record, I’m not going to spend time in this post talking about the criteria for something to be considered an unmet need. That’s a whole different topic to unpack. This is about creative concept development. Need Statements and Challenge Statements are both statements. Boom! That’s one thing they have in common. Another similarity: They are both tools used to launch ideation sessions intended to generate many possible solutions to a problem.

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Tyler Hagler
February 19, 2019

How Much Does It Cost to Launch a Product from Concept to Market?

You can easily spend far more to design the product than it is worth. However, with a good understanding of risk management, situationally appropriate new product design methods, and clear-eyed forecasting, you can make smart investments that will make a positive return across a portfolio of ideas.

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Andrew DiMeo
February 19, 2019

Design and Development - What's the Difference?

Design exists along the entire continuum. It’s not design then development, but rather design and development. The ancient roots of the word “Design” have meanings such as to indicate with a mark or sign and to have a particular purpose or intention. Design is about asking questions, and asking the right, or most meaningful questions. What basic science research can I do today to have the most impact on society tomorrow? What car should we build with this new fuel cell technology? Who will be the first to adopt such a technology, and what does car look like for them?

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Andrew DiMeo
January 22, 2019

Design Thinking and the Design Process - What's the Difference?

I’m compelled to start with a great lesson illustrated in the book, “The Goal” by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. That lesson: If you take the manufacturing process developed by Toyota (better known as the Toyota Production System or TPS), and implement that process in your manufacturing facility - it won’t work.

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Tyler Hagler
December 5, 2018

How Do Frameworks Improve Decision-making?

Frameworks are useful tools for understanding the decisions you face. At the outset of each project, Trig Innovation seeks to understand our client's strategic perspective. We think of strategy as making decisions about what you will not do - just as much as deciding what you will do.

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Andrew DiMeo
December 4, 2018

Design Thinking and Human Centered Design - What's the Difference?

What is the difference between design thinking and human centered design? It’s hard to ignore all the talk around human centered design (HCD) and design thinking these days. A quick google search of those terms, in quotes, reveals a combined 23 million results. Digging into those results, and the opinions on the topic might make a head spin.

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Samantha Harr
November 26, 2018

Why Is There So Much Buzz About Design Thinking Recently?

Where did design thinking come from and what does it mean? How can we use design thinking to enhance our approaches to overcoming obstacles and finding solutions?

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Andrew DiMeo
October 24, 2018

What are Health Innovation Trends for 2019?

We are seeing it already, and we will continue to see it in 2019: a shift from reactive care to prevention. And I’m not so sure “prevention” is strong enough. In 2019 and beyond, it may even be about improving health. When you hear (and I’ve heard it) a 60-something year old say, “I’m in the best shape of my life.” - that’s what I’m talking about. So what are the Health Innovation trends of today, 2019, and beyond?

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Tyler Hagler
October 10, 2018

What is Human-Centered Design?

At Trig, human-centered design is a philosophy put into daily practice. We approach each new product design challenge with the mindset of a student, listening and watching carefully to understand the customer needs and experiences throughout the process. We wonder: How can we make the product or service not only functional and solve an existing problem, but also a joyful experience?

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Tyler Hagler
May 11, 2018

What is the Terminal Velocity of a Tyrannosaurus Rex?

How would you go about calculating the fastest speed at which a Tyrannosaurus Rex could fall? As an aside, the speed of sound is 340 m/s, so a skydiving Tyrannosaurus would be the first animal to generate a sonic boom.

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Tyler Hagler
October 26, 2017

What is the Difference Between Creativity and Innovation?

What is the difference between creativity and innovation? At first glance, the two concepts may seem almost synonymous, but there is an important distinction and inseparable connection between them.

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Sofia Deneke
July 10, 2017

What is Cool Hunting?

Cool hunting is the practice of researching the youth culture in the street or underground scenes in order to predict future or upcoming trends, in the context of design. The term cool hunting has an inherent sociocultural element to it, since it is the current society’s ideals that dictate what is cool and uncool, the zeitgeist, or the “spirit of the times”.

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The Trig Team
April 28, 2017

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research? | Methods

Quantitative research methods emphasize measurement. Qualitative research methods emphasize understanding. Learn more about these two strategies of information analysis and how the Trig team applies them to industrial design.

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The Trig Team
April 28, 2017

What Are the Origins of Design Thinking?

Design Thinking has generated a lot of momentum through mentions in the Harvard Business Review and Forbes. A majority of corporations operate analytically and can be disrupted by trends that sometimes renders businesses obsolete, you must create a culture that fosters creativity, methods that promote innovation, and the tools that designers utilize can be perfect in the effort to avoid these pitfalls.

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The Trig Team
April 26, 2017

What is the difference between a concept, theory, hypothesis, and paradigm?

More recently, the internet has created communities of people who share fringe paradigms such as a fear of vaccines or a belief that the world is flat. The term has largely fallen out of favor in most business circles as a lofty expression that demonstrates the speaker’s lack of familiarity with modern innovation concepts for generating pragmatic solutions.

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The Trig Team
May 20, 0207

What is Digital Innovation?

Definition of digital innovation: the application of digital tools to the many varieties of innovation methodologies to improve performance of innovation teams. Digital innovation is NOT business model innovation.