After years of helping corporations ranging from Microsoft to Amazon advance their products from concepts to the manufacturing line, Port Townsend’s Kennard Nielsen is looking to do the same for smaller-scale entrepreneurs.

“I continually saw the same pattern,” Nielsen said. “These entrepreneurs would have these great ideas, but not long after they prototyped them, it was like they hit a wall, because they didn’t know how to design their products for mass manufacturing.”

Nielsen estimated that 90 percent of electronics entrepreneurs fail at this stage. As one of the folks who worked on developing the early versions of Kindle and Xbox Kinect, he saw an opportunity to help others avoid such pitfalls.

SMART EARBUDS

One of Nielsen’s most recent projects, before he went into business for himself as a consultant, was working with Doppler Labs to develop the Here One wireless smart earbuds.

“They digitize sound in real time,” Nielsen said. “They have more processing power than most cell phones. You can use an app, not only to turn the volume up or down, but also to equalize sound levels.”

Perhaps more importantly, Nielsen explained, the earbuds employ an algorithm that distinguishes between specific types of sounds, allowing the user to exclude certain sounds, as well as focus on one or more sounds to the exclusion of all others.

“If you’re in an airplane, you can remove the engine noise while still hearing people talk,” Nielsen said. “If a baby cries, it will ask you if you want to remove that sound. In a restaurant, the microphone array is attuned to focus the voice of who you’re looking at, but you can also reverse it to eavesdrop on people behind you.”

Looking ahead, Nielsen acknowledged that he’s keeping his client list as a consultant “very low” for now, although he did say he is working with Pax Labs, a developer of vaporizers, as well as an unnamed virtual reality (VR) company that’s exploring a more tactile dimension of VR than the standard sets of immersive goggles.

“Through a special shirt, you could feel hot and cold temperatures, as well as sensations as small as an ant running across your chest,” Nielsen said. “If you were running in VR, you could actually feel forces acting on your body as though you were running. In a fighting game, you could feel punches, although there would obviously be safeguards in effect.”

ENGAGING CUSTOMERS

While Nielsen is in no rush to give away the tricks of his trade, one of the most common foundational failings he identified in product startups was not engaging consumers properly.

“The first question you should be answering is ‘Why?’” Nielsen said. “That engages the rational and emotional parts of the brain. It’s why your gut feelings are so often right, even if you can’t articulate the reasons. ‘Why?’ should be the core concern throughout the product development.”

From there, Nielsen identified “What?” and “How?” as the successive questions, with the answer to “What?” being “the minimum parameters for a viable product” that can be built upon and expanded through the process, and “How?” being the engineering and design methods.

“A lot of people think that developing a prototype is sufficient,” Nielsen said. “You have to design for manufacturing (DFM) for hyper-volumes of millions of products sold per year. The Kinect sells something like 525,000 per week, and it has a very complex assembly, so it had to be designed so that it could be mass-produced on that scale.”

Nielsen offers smaller-scale and newer entrepreneurs not only the benefit of such insights, but also his connections within the global manufacturing industry.

“I can introduce them to manufacturers in China, since I’ve lived there,” Nielsen said. “If you’re too small for larger manufacturers to return your calls, I can use my relationships with folks in the country to get those calls returned. When they realize I was involved with the design, and in making it DFM, they know there won’t be any showstoppers along the way.”

For more information about Nielsen’s consulting business, see theglobalelement.com.