How I Innovate and a Key Phase of My Product Development

I lead the design of my company’s products. From Zenvus to other products we deliver to clients, I drive the technical strategy. During my doctoral degree in the Johns Hopkins University, I built things. And as a Global Lead ASIC Design Engineer with Analog Devices Corp, I launched products. In Carnegie Mellon University, the elements were perfected.

I am an Igbo man (from Nigeria). We like containers. We like products. That is our tradition. I like to own  things, and that was the drive into entrepreneurship: to build for myself, my family, and my stakeholders. We are doing well.

Now that I run my shop, I use the first rule: the best ideas are never published by industry veterans in any journal. And when published, it is more of a marketing dossier because you get an idea of the breakthrough but you hardly get any value. It is an illusion to think any company can publish a complete product design with capacity to generate billions of dollars in revenue. That will never happen unless they re-register as charities.

So in Fasmicro Group, I have a strategy in our product engineering: I read journals but I also buy many products and we tear them down. It is very shameful but that is the state we are now. Simply, I borrow ideas, or clearly I copy.

I copy and I do that making sure we comply with all laws and IP rights. I do not have millions of dollars to setup R&D labs with scale to compete with the best. Good enough most of the challenging ideas, when solved, are not patented. All you need is to figure out how they have solved some challenging design problems. You do this from the level of firmware, components choice and all the way to chipsets and systems. Right there, you will see how they are handling issues you are facing.

Please note that innovation does not mean you have to reinvent the wheel. Brilliance can come when you understand what the best designers are doing and learn from products they have made. But do so legally.

A Teardown for Product Design Insights

Below is a teardown to help understand what leading companies are doing on mobile {blank} as we work on a key phase of a product. We have “wasted” four new tablets and continue to work to understand many elements. It is very interesting when you see what is going on. I will leave that out because that is my business IP. Can you see the Apple “A6” chip near MediaTek chipset? This is powered by Android. But do not hold your breath – very exciting.

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