Technology agnostic

Ten years ago the choices behind an embedded product essentially amounted to”AVR or PIC?”for most small embedded projects happening in Australia. And while the question lead to some hilarious cultish behaviour by some engineers, the decision made didn’t really make much difference to the end product.

These days with the number of system on chip ICs and development frameworks and cloud services available to make a connected IoT system, It’s a product developer’s job to stay across and keep informed of the strengths and weaknesses and possibilities of all technologies available.

Are your device’s communications needs best met by an existing solution? LoRa, WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID, Ethernet, RS485, CAN bus, Infrared, Powerline Networking, or something else? Is there a known good integrated System On Chip (SOC) solution that can be used to build what you want as small and low power as you need it? Are you connecting your systems to the internet? – If so, are your security, network data, and processing requirements best met by Microsoft’s Azure, IBM’s Watson, Google’s firebase.io, or a simple database instance (SQL or noSQL?) and some applications built on a virtual server?

Being able to fairly and efficiently determine which possibilities best fit a new product feature at the start of the process leads to a development path that doesn’t feel like jamming an increasingly square peg into a triangular hole. It means a smoother development path, with less chance of a “rip up and retry” event when you were hoping for a release.

Collaborative business model

There’s a lot to know these days about product development, and nobody can know every detail of everything.

A collaborative business finds and identifies peer businesses, and focuses on a working relationship with these businesses where any given task can be assigned to the appropriate experts and completed to a known level of quality.

Rather than trying to retain experts on every single subject in the product development field, the focus here is to maintain expertise in core development functions and maintain enough knowledge in associated fields, to enable effective specification of work and collaboration with other experts as required.

It allows a business to be truly technology agnostic, rather than tied to the particular technologies that the company’s full time employees are strongest in.

Product design ownership

At the payment of your final invoice, you are the owner of all IP created for your product. This means that with Means of Invention you don’t just get manufacturing files, you get CAD files, firmware files, test files, experimental records. Basically, all of the files you have paid to create.

This means that if for any reason we can’t help you with product changes in future, you have the ability to go ahead and find someone else to do the job. (though if we are available at the time you need, we’re pretty certain you’ll want to stay with us…)

Note that means of Invention still reserves the right to re use and by extension re license general and non definitive design components (for instance – a command processing function or a generic communications stack layer, or a driver for a particular component) but would not reuse something intrinsic to your product.