R vs D What’s the difference?
Most product development companies take an existing technology and reconfigure it into a manufacturable product. This is what we refer to as Development. The definition in Wikipedia:
“In business and engineering, new product development (NPD) covers the complete process of bringing a new product to market, renewing an existing product or introducing a product in a new market. A central aspect of NPD is product design, along with various business considerations. New product development is described broadly as the transformation of a market opportunity into a product available for sale.[1] ”
Omnica however does more than just product development and often our product development activities turn more into Research. The definition in Wikipedia:
Research is “creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge”.[1] It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of information to increase understanding of a topic or issue. A research project may be an expansion on past work in the field. To test the validity of instruments, procedures, or experiments, research may replicate elements of prior projects or the project as a whole.
While most development organizations focus on development. Ominca has years of expertise performing research as well. This research meshes well with Omnica’s vertically integrated prototyping approach to allow us to perform very rapid data collection cycles that would not ordinarily be possible. We incorporate research into most of our developments very early in our process. This allows us to solve fundamental questions at the subsystem level before we approach the fully integrated system design. The benefit being significant risk reduction in the program.
Examples might be, can this alternative, lower cost, material meet the product requirements? Does this fluidics approach deliver the volumes and flow consistently enough for our product? Can we we control this system accurately enough to meet the requirements?
Omnica are LabView experts and have written hundreds of programs for data collection. Because this is second nature for us, we tend to incorporate more data collection into our development process than others might. We have found that our customers appreciate the evidence-based risk reduction that this process produces.
So while you think you might not need R in your D, you will probably need the research skills somewhere along the way as most of our customers do.
Who We Are
Omnica Corporation is a privately-held design, engineering, and medical product development firm located in Irvine, California. The 28-person company is staffed with full-time employees and has been in operation since 1984. Our speciality is custom product development for the medical industry and industrial fields.
Our expertise is developing complex medical devices.Technical personnel at Omnica includes designers, mechanical engineers, electronic and software engineers, advanced R&D specialists, regulatory staff (for FDA documentation), machinists and model makers.
