College of Engineering
Rowan University
201 Mullica Hill Road
Glassboro, NJ 0808-1701
Course Coordinator: Anthony Marchese
Week
3 Laboratory
Engineering
Design Project
1. Market Research
Estimating
Total Market Potential
Before getting
started on a developing a new product, it is necessary to have a reasonable
idea of the market potential. For example, is the total market potential?
Believe it or not, with only a few pieces of demographic information, it is possible to estimate the market potential for a product to within +/- 50%, which is not a bad start.
- 1000 products/year
- 10,000 products/year
- 100,000 products/year
- 1,000,000 products/year
Some links to help you out in the market research phase:
Competitive
Assessment
Are their competitive
products already on the market? Who are your competitors? What
size is the company? What are the sales? How do you go about
obtaining a competitor's product for evaluation? How do you evaluate
your competitor's product?
Example: Criteria for competitive assessment
Focus Groups
To develop the all important Customer
Attributes for your House of Quality, a group of potential customers can
be gathered together and asked the simple question: What is quality?
2. Intellectual Property Search
One of the first steps in embarking on an original design is to examine, in detail the current state of Intellectual Property relating to that product.
Our legal system has created the concept of intellectual property to encourage the creation of valuable ideas, and to protect them from being stolen. The four main classes of intellectual property are as follows (from the Lemelson Foundation, Handbook for Inventors):
Patents. A patent is a grant issued by the federal government giving an inventor the right to exclude others from making, using or selling an invention in the United States. A patent, however, does not necessarily guarantee inventors the right to make, use or sell their own inventions. In some cases, using a patented invention depends on another person's prior, unexpired patent. Violating patent rights is known as infringement and can be litigated.
Patent search engines.
IBM Patent ServerTrademarks. A trademark is a word, logo, slogan, symbol or design - or a combination - that distinguishes a product or a service. A brand name is one common type of trademark. Trademarks promote competition by giving products corporate identity and marketing leverage. No federal law protecting trademarks exists. Legal definitions vary from state to state.
US Patent Office
Copyrights. A copyright is a right that protects published and unpublished works such as literary, dramatic, musical, dance, films, etc. and computer programs from being copied. Copyrights protect the expression of ideas and not the ideas themselves. They give their owners (who may or may not be the authors) exclusive rights to reproduce the copyrighted material.
Trade Secrets. A trade secret is a formula, pattern, manufacturing process, method of doing business, or technical know-how that gives it's holder competitive advantage. Trade secrets cover a wide spectrum of information, including chemical compounds, machine patterns and customer lists. An example is the formula for Coca-Cola.
To create your personal web page:
2. Create a directory called www in your personal area on galaxy. For example, if your last name is Smith and the last 4 digits of your social security number are 1234, you should have an account on galaxy called ~smit1234.
3. Open up Netscape Communicator and load a web page template by clicking below.
4. In the tool bar menu, Click on File, Edit Page. This should open up another Netscape Composer window, which can be edited.
5. To save the results, Click on File, Save As. Save the file in the directory ~smit1234/www/. The file name must be index.html. This is now your home page! The web address is: http://engineering.rowan.edu/~smit1234
6. To create your company web page, just save other files in .html format in the same www directory on galaxy. For example, if you create a file called company.html, the web address will be: http://engineering.rowan.edu/~smit1234/company.html.