Furniture Design Ideas

One other tool in the legal system can be used to protect IP—the trade secret. This is an option for some companies that want the com­petitive advantage only until their product is released, or for those products that cannot be reverse-engineered (harder and harder to protect with today’s technologies). A trade secret is protected, obvi­ously, […]

Copyright and trademarks do not address the look of the product itself. A powerful emerging approach to protect the look of a product over the long term is to establish a trade dress for the product. Trade dress is probably the least understood but most important form of iP protection from a long-term brand benefit. […]

Companies use copyright and trademark protection for works of authorship such as music, writings, art, and forms (the copyright), and any words, names, and symbols that indicate the source of the prod­uct, such as a logo (the trademark). In the United States, copyright protection lasts as long as the author is alive, plus 70 years. […]

The design patent is the companion to the utility patent. Design patents protect the form of an “article of manufacture.” Design patents protect the effort to create aesthetic innovation. They are simpler to formulate than utility patents and are as vague as a utility patent is precise. The design patent is a sketch or two […]

The judicial system believes that, in general, everything that is made or described can be copied by anyone else. The exceptions are those that are protected through IP law.1,2 There are several aspects to legal IP protection. From a product development viewpoint, these can be divided into technology and style. On the technology side, utility […]

P&G created an entire system around floor sweeping through the Swiffer brand. But the Swiffer sweeper system is not the only one out there. S. C. Johnson’s Pledge Grab-It is a competitive system that was introduced the same month. It seems like there is no difference between them for the average person. Why, then, is […]

For Procter & Gamble, those cloths are important, because that is where P&G makes its money; the mop itself is just a delivery sys­tem for the cloths. The idea of constant sale of disposable attach­ments is a golden one, used long ago by IBM with its computer punch cards and still used today by Gillette […]

Innovative product developers spend time in the field. They observe, interview, and analyze the actual people who will use their product. At New Balance, Josh Kaplan from the advanced product group flies around the country and goes on runs with different lead users, under­standing the nuances that make their running experience great. Designers at Whirlpool […]

This chapter illustrates a comprehensive methodology that includes the issues and tools presented in earlier chapters. It begins with how companies identify opportunities to develop new products, how they expand their understanding of those opportunities, and how they translate that understanding into a set of product requirements or specifications that fulfill the market’s needs. The […]

As companies struggle to find new competitive advantage, they are using a number of techniques to stimulate organic growth. These approaches include working with respected experts to run workshops and hiring consulting firms to support and bring new perspectives. To extend R&D capability, some companies turn to universities to conduct research and exploration into areas […]