Most inventors who reach the Enhance Innovations office in Champlin, Minnesota have already shown their invention to someone they should not have. A neighbor who used to work in plastics. A cousin who runs a small ecommerce store. A person at a trade show who said...
The inventor who tells you they nailed it on the first prototype is either remembering it wrong or about to find out otherwise in tooling. Since 2010, working on consumer products out of Champlin, Minnesota, the Enhance Innovations team has rarely seen a...
Most prototype testing is the wrong kind of testing. The inventor shows the work to a friend, the friend says "neat, this is cool," and the inventor reports back to the team that the prototype tested well. Nothing has been learned. The next $20,000 in...
A 3D printer turns a CAD file into a physical part for somewhere between $5 and $200 in 4 to 48 hours. That changed the economics of physical prototyping more than any other shift in the last 30 years. It also leads inventors to print things that should not be...
Most inventors over-spec their first prototype by a wide margin. They picture machined aluminum and production-grade plastic when the question in front of them is still "does this geometry work at all," and that question gets answered on a screen, not a...
