Innovation for leaders

Essential is the design innovation partner for leaders seeking to accelerate business success. We are a focused team of research, design and engineering professionals, whose design thinking methods inform and translate strategy into breakthrough products and services.

Research

How do you make smart decisions in complex situations where speed to market is critical to success? You need good information – derived from end-users, markets and trends; considered in context, with assumptions and risks clearly identified.

Essential uses innovative research and analysis processes to create a deep understanding of stakeholder needs. We provide complete and actionable information that answers questions like, “What are our next great opportunities?” and “What is our precise target for success?”

Discovery

Our discovery research reveals unmet demands and illuminates market gaps for product and service innovation. Using a wide range of ethnographic and participatory design-research tools, we identify fresh opportunities by exposing underlying needs, desires and goals that can otherwise go undiscovered.
Definition

Our definition research puts new opportunities under the magnifying glass to give them greater clarity and context. We help you understand opportunities from multiple perspectives to align priorities, focus strategy and direct development. Our definition research deliverables delineate new opportunities insightfully and precisely to give you a competitive advantage.

Strategy

A well-defined and articulated opportunity is the starting point for strategy. We approach business strategy as the design process of devising and implementing a plan to achieve a clear, shared marketing goal.

As your strategy partners, we transform insights into actionable vision and tangible plans that gain traction across your organization.

Vision

Combining experience with foresight, leaders envision their role in future markets, then build compelling cases to invest in and exploit those opportunities. Essential helps companies align internal and external business forces to visualize and develop a unique approach to a specific opportunity. We use design thinking processes to create scenarios for future product and service opportunities, frame competitive positioning, articulate brand promises and, most importantly, illustrate opportunities in ways that inform, engage and excite stakeholders.
Planning

Turning opportunities into successful offers requires a foolproof plan for implementation. Essential’s strategy planning processes create product and service roadmaps, define channel requirements, outline development tactics and anticipate marketing communication needs. In short, we do the work to answer the question “What steps are required for our strategy to succeed?”

Development

Thoughtful research and clear strategy are critical to success. But passion and development experience are also required to transform plans into new products and services that are engaging, desirable, robust and profitable.

Essential’s design and engineering teams give form to user experiences by developing products and services that are on-strategy, on-point with users and customers, and on-target to hit performance requirements necessary for success.

Design

Our industrial, interaction and service design teams create beautiful, easy-to-use products and services. By integrating design into research and strategy processes, we are extremely successful at addressing strategic imperatives while creating compelling designs that appeal to the emotions, have a high degree of usability and solve problems in elegant ways.
Engineering

Our engineering teams provide the technical, manufacturing, sourcing and project management work necessary to bring your offer to market. We actively manage partners’ inputs, integrating electrical, software and firmware requirements into robust development prototypes and production databases. We see and address risks before they impact schedule. And we ensure that the time and effort you invest in your design vision makes its way into production and into the market.

Consumer

To succeed in fast-moving, highly competitive markets for consumer products and services, you need outstanding targeting skills and ever more advanced delivery skills. Speed to market is critical — but only when you deliver the products and services that people truly desire.

What makes one product or service cool? When is it smart to offer multiple SKUs? How far can you extend a single platform? What makes an application “killer”? What does it take to excite the channel?

Finding answers to questions like these is the real art in design — and it is the way we approach creating connections to consumers that go deeper than just form and function.

In addition to the work
highlighted above, our
team has experience with:

Bic
Escort
Franklin
Gillette
iRobot
Jarden
Kyocera
P&G
Pepper Computer
Polaroid
Sanford
SCJohnson
TDK
World Kitchen

Consumer

AARP

Research: Discovery

How do you design a good teacher?

AARP wanted to reach beyond its traditional demographic and capture the minds and sensibilities of a younger generation. Although this generation is in prime position to build a secure future for itself, it is in many cases also saddled by debt…

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Consumer

Altec Lansing

Research: Discovery

How important is music to you?

To reveal new product opportunities for immediate and long-term iPod docking, mobile and PC audio products, Essential led a global research effort to extend Altec’s knowledge of ideal listening contexts by exploring the role of music in people’s lives…

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Field Reseach, Korea
Strategy: Vision

Essential conducted discovery research designed to inform the strategic planning process. We worked with Altec Lansing to apply our structured insights…

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Mobile Product Roadmap
Development: Design

Essential strategy work drove the design of a new family of docking and portable audio products with use-driven features built around defined product platforms…

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Altec Product Family

CES Design & Engineering Award
Development: Engineering

Essential’s engineering team supported overseas Altec Lansing manufacturing suppliers by developing and implementing creative, appropriate solutions to various engineering, manufacturing and assembly issues as they arose…

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Consumer

Dell

Development: Design

How do you keep an eye on the future?

To stay on top of international consumer goods markets, Dell asked Essential to benchmark current and future trends that could influence next generation product design and user experiences.

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Dell Trend Research

Consumer

Klipsch

Strategy: Vision

How different should your mass-market products be?

To grow their position in key mass-retail channels, Klipsch recognized the need to develop new products that more closely aligned their brand with lifestyle-driven consumers…

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Definition of Klipsch Offering
Development: Design

Klipsch recognized that they needed to extend their product offer to address and capitalize on the rapid adoption rate of flat panel televisions…

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Klipsch Surround Sound Speaker System

CES Innovations award
Excite Custom Retailer Award
Business Week IDEA Finalist
Development: Design

To launch a new wireless technology platform, Essential worked with Klipsch to develop a unique and meaningfully different design language that established a new aesthetic vision for this category of Lifestyle products…

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Klipsch Roomgroove

CES Innovations award
Electronic House
Business Week IDEA Finalist
Development: Engineering

By identifying key technical risks and providing rich conceptual-engineering deliverables, Essential actively advised Klipsch in directing their final development efforts overseas…

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Klipsch Roomgroove

Consumer

Moen

Research: Discovery

Are you selling a product or an experience?

Essential was asked to uncover opportunities in shower experience design and translate that into new product opportunities…

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Research: Definition

Using proprietary design research co-creation techniques, Essential helped Moen establish a product platform for future kitchen faucet development based on end-user-driven parameters…

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Development: Design

The Moen Cascata lavatory faucet was conceived as an expression of natural water flow to create a more engaging product experience. Water flow is controlled by tipping the spout itself—like tipping a pitcher of water…

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Moen Cascata lavatory faucet

Good Design
Spark! Award

Consumer

Puma

Development: Design

Fashion Technology is an idea about innovation where function transcends utility and becomes the driving visual brand identity feature…

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Development: Engineering

Puma asked Essential to take the SpiderCell concept and develop it into an engineered, manufacturable component…

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Development: Design

Essential updated the highly effective Puma Duocell technology by moving away from the “mechanical” look of perfect hexagons…

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Puma Mio

Consumer

Pyrex

Research: Discovery

What innovation opportunities will revitalize interest in your brand—while staying within consumers’ parameters for acceptable brand elasticity?

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Pyrex Opportunity Map
Development: Design

A market gap in food preparation was selected by Pyrex as a high-value opportunity in which Pyrex could bring innovation to its core line of measuring cups and mixing bowls. The Essential goal was to “mix” the core values of Pyrex and “spice up” the category…

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Pyrex Mixing Bowl

Good Design Award

Consumer

Saris

Research: Definition

How would you respond to a new player entering your market with a game-changing technology?

As a power-training technology provider, Saris Cycling Group chose Essential to redesign its core offer as a new competitor brought GPS functionality into the category…

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Saris Research

Consumer

Zink

Strategy: Vision

What is required to characterize a new technology and make it relevant in new markets?

ZINK is a new technology platform that enables printing in full color without the need for ink cartridges or ribbons…

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Development: Design

How do you express the value of a disruptive new technology in tangible ways?

To communicate opportunities for ZINK, a new inkless printing technology, Essential developed multiple product architectures to reflect the scalability of the technology across a broad suite of potential applications…

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Photo Printer

Healthcare

The most successful healthcare delivery devices and interactive solutions simplify complex technology and present benefits in the most natural way possible.

Of the many roles we take on when partnering with clients, our most valuable contribution is as a “technological interpreter.” For physicians and technicians, we interpret technologies as features that enhance control, speed and accuracy. For patients and homecare providers, we create convenience, simplicity and error elimination. For client teams, we meet market, channel and manufacturing needs.

Our process focuses on design control to drive robust results, but it’s our approach and our experience as skilled “translators” that differentiates our contribution.

In addition to the work
highlighted above, our
team has experience with:

Acme Medical
ACMI
Active ECG
Advoy
Alkermes
Baxter
Becton, Dickinson
Biowave
Boston Scientific
Candela
Chemical Abstracts Services
Dentovations
Eli Lilly
GSK
IEC
J&J Ethicon
Kendall
Lifeline Systems
MeYou Health
Neurometrix
Novartis
Onux Medical
Osteonics
Ortho Biotech
Patient Keeper
Philips Medical
Smith & Nephew
Zeiss

Healthcare

Curbell

Strategy: Planning

How do you express barriers to success in ways that motivate cross-functional action?

Since Curbell invited Essential to actively collaborate on design and engineering projects, a deeper dialog about process, structure, and management factors that influence success has evolved…

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Development: Design

How do you inject new life into your product line and development process at the same time?
Curbell asked Essential to help them do just that. Having identified emerging worldwide healthcare trends poised to threaten their leadership position, Curbell tapped Essential to bring a fresh approach in developing the first commercially available IPX-7 nurse call button.
In the process, Essential helped drive fundamental changes in Curbell’s product development process, reducing time to market by more than 50%.

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Development: Engineering

Getting products to market quickly requires sweating the details. Essential’s engineering team worked closely with Curbell’s quality, regulatory and sourcing teams to ensure that product and project risks were identified, mitigated and documented under design control procedures, resulting in a robust, compliant, innovative product in less time.

Healthcare

Genzyme

Research: Discovery

How do you establish a patient-centered point of view when most of your patients are not yet diagnosed?

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Genzyme Research
Strategy: Vision

Based on the desires of health care specialists, Essential created a series of dashboard views and reports wizards for patients, clinicians, researchers, regulators and payers…

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Healthcare

Haemonetics

Research: Definition

How do you align priorities across disciplines, user segments and markets?

We often help our clients discover market and user needs and craft a vision for their new product development efforts. We can also help our clients confirm their vision and even prioritize competing visions held by respective stakeholders.

As the industry-leading blood management company Haemonetics initiated a key new program…

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Healthcare

IDEXX

Research: Definition

How should a diagnostic device accommodate unique user needs and workplace protocols?

To understand the range of issues that contribute to best practices, ease of use and enhanced workflow efficiency, Essential collected data…

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User Research
Development: Design

Successfully integrating the latest diagnostic technologies into a new device that emphasizes usability and efficiency equally is no small challenge…

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IDEXX Diagnostic Equipment

Healthcare

Lipid Sciences

Development: Design

How early in the process can design spark interest in a business opportunity?

Essential collaborated with Lipid Sciences to give form to their technology…

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Development: Engineering

The Essential engineering team led a fast-tracked co-development effort with Lipid Sciences to establish a mechanical platform design that could simultaneously support Essential design vision work…

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Healthcare

Philips

Development: Design

What message are you trying to convey?

When companies develop breakthrough technologies, it’s natural to want a “breakthrough” look. The design team at Philips Respironics takes a more sophisticated, user-centered approach to…

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Healthcare

Sensix

Strategy: Vision

What would you do?

2.2 million school-aged children suffer from food allergies. Peanut allergies alone have doubled in the last decade. When one of our kids was rushed to the emergency room in anaphylactic shock, and our team learned about …

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BusinessWeek IDEA Award

Healthcare

WellDoc

Research: Discovery

How do you adjust your offer when transitioning from a lead-user segment to the mass market?

As an information service provider, WellDoc has effected dramatic improvements in diabetic patient outcomes…

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Field Research
Strategy: Planning

Essential identified important attitudinal and behavior differences among patients and their doctors and identified ways in which these parameters might intersect.

Essential championed the notion that WellDoc products should “behave” with a personality…

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Planning Sessions
Development: Design

Essential modified a mobile phone application to simplify data entry (blood sugar readings and medications) and made adjustments to alert messaging…

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Implementation

Commercial

Business-to-business relationships succeed on a combination of trust and value. To create innovative commercial products and services, we pay attention to the critical details of brand expression, business partner needs and stakeholder value along the total value chain.

Rather than focusing strictly on product features, we often contribute true innovation at the buyer/seller interaction level. What interactive systems could enhance your relationship with customers? How can we magnify the impact of the user experience? Where can we engage our customers in the development process to ensure their acceptance?

By taking a more thoughtful approach to business-level transactions, we innovate in important ways.

In addition to the work
highlighted above, our
team has experience with:

AIQ
Brady
Boston Retail Products
C&D Technologies
Cecropia
Cooper Perkins
Imation
New Product Innovations
Peer Insight
Pitney Bowes
Raymarine
RDVO
Sapient
Vast

Commercial

Dell

Strategy: Vision

How do you leverage your partner’s capabilities?

Dell’s design group employs Essential to uncover and develop new ideas for design innovation. Our close partnership…

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Dell Technology and Culture Report
Development: Design

Dell recognized that a cohesive design language would contribute significantly to the success of their next-generation enterprise product family and engaged Essential to help them…

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Dell PowerEdge R710
Development: Design

Dell was developing a new business-class platform to offer a more highly featured and ruggedized product to true road warriors in tough physical environments…

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Dell Latitude E6400 ATG

Commercial

EMC

Development: Design

How do you account for the value of design when the product image is your brand image?

Safe data is fundamental to business success…

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Commercial

Fishman

Strategy: Vision

How much influence should design have on a technology company’s strategy?

Fishman Transducers was in the process of shifting their growth model from an OEM-focused integrated technology provider to the acoustic musician’s favorite…

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Development: Design

For professional acoustic-guitar players, subtle variations in tone matter. So do users’ demands for on-the-fly control. The Fishman acoustic imaging technologies that serve these needs are truly state-of-the-art…

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iF Product Design Award
RedDot Product Design Award
Business Week IDEA Finalist
Good Design Award
CES Design & Engineering Award

Commercial

Harvard

Research: Discovery

What is meaningful content?

Working in collaboration with Sapient, Essential designed and conducted research with Harvard alumni to…

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Strategy: Planning

Essential identified, prototyped and validated an approach to personalization that delivered on Harvard’s business criteria and addressed user needs…

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Commercial

Legrand

Research: Discovery

What growth opportunities allow you to leverage your unique strengths?

Most manufacturing companies take a technology-driven approach to answering this question—and to new product development in general…

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Legrand Opportunities
Research: Definition

Capturing the voice of the customer isn’t enough.

Customers can only say so much, and what they say is often very different from what they do. This requires highly informed investigation into customer behaviors…

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Commercial

Lexicon

Development: Design

Can product architecture innovation reframe pricing and margin structures?

Lexicon selected Essential to reposition their best-in-class recording studio brand as a technology-design leader in home recording…

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I-ONIX Desktop Recording Interface

RedDot Product Design Award
Music Tech Choice Award
Development: Engineering

Engaging retailers during the development process can help ensure success, but only if you deliver on expectations—and deliver quickly.

To meet retailers’ desire for pricing flexibility, Essential worked closely with Lexicon…

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I-ONIX Desktop Recording Interface

Commercial

Owens Corning

Research: Discovery

How can design thinking provide value to an “invisible” new home construction component?

As a piece of plastic that covers a hole in the roof and is then covered by shingles, the passive ridge vent didn’t have a very appealing “personality”…

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VentSure® 4-Foot Strip
Development: Engineering

Essential worked with Owens Corning to develop a line of next-generation residential roof vents that responded to varying needs of contractors around the country. Using design-driven development methodologies…

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VentSure® 4-Foot Strip

Commercial

Shure

Research: Definition

Innovation expertise involves knowing where to innovate—and where not to.

Essential research efforts pinpointed critical usability conventions in wireless live audio contexts that, if injudiciously “improved,” could introduce unacceptable risk…

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Shure Research
Development: Design

If you want to express technological mastery, you must demonstrate technological sophistication where it is expected. And then, you need to go deeper…

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KSM9

Good Design Award
Development: Engineering

Desire for commercial attributes can translate to huge opportunities in consumer markets. Shure’s professional users required great sound but they couldn’t get it for their iPods…

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E4 Earphones

iF Product Design Award
BusinessWeek IDEA Award

Commercial

Wright Line

Research: Definition

Since salespeople aren’t end users, should you engage them in the design process?

The short answer is yes, but how they engage directly affects the value of their input…

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Strategy: Vision

What new market segment will give you growth potential without distracting you from your core market?

In our work for Wright Line, Essential identified and evaluated the business potential of new target markets…

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Development: Design

If your brand values aren’t reflected in your products, customers sense the disconnect and will look elsewhere the next time they buy.

To deliver on Wright Line’s technical furniture promise…

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Development: Engineering

Systems products demand clever engineering to achieve maximum platform flexibility while meeting numerous—and often conflicting—design requirements…

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Blog

Creative Mornings Kicks-Off In Bostonby Danielle Perretty

Exciting news! Creative Mornings has finally arrived to Boston. The monthly breakfast lecture series for creative types is the brainchild of blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg – also known as “Swiss Miss”. Hundreds of design buffs attend Creative Mornings every month, in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Zurich. Armed with caffeine and a PowerPoint, designers, artists, photographers and writers from all over come to hear the unique perspectives of fellow professionals in the industry.

I’m happy to annouce that our very own Richard Watson was asked to present for the sold-out, inaugural Boston event. Richard described his own discovery and path to design, including his beginnings of living on a farm in Wensleydale, England to becoming a business owner in Boston.

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News

Essential Events & Awards

BusinessWeek & IDSA Silver IDEA Award

Richard Watson Speaks to CES on Design

Richard was asked to lead a discussion at the 15th Annual Consumer Electronics CEO Summit in Stresa, Italy.

The conversation focused on how design transcends borders and entices people to buy. Design impacts brand, functionality, consumer appeal and it also affects the bottom line. Fellow panelists from Google, BMW, Philips Healthcare and Legrand discussed why design matters to an audience of CEO’s.

Other highlights of the summit included meetings of the CEA board of industry leaders, CEA technology advisors, and a trend preview of 2012 International CES, presented by Shawn DuBravac, chief economist/research director of CEA.

CEO Summit>

Team

Essential is a carefully chosen team of world-class researchers, designers and engineers who share quality and service
values that drive us to develop category-leading products and services.

Arvin Abadilla

Designer

Analytically oriented designer of user-centered products and services. A generalist who combines creative and technical skills to create relevant and simple solutions to tactical and systems-level design problems. Relentless explorer in pursuit of discoveries that reveal innovation opportunities.

Prior to Essential: BMW Designworks, Concept Center International

Associations: IDSA

Education: B.S., Industrial Design, University of Houston

Contact

Essential
143 South Street
6th Floor
Boston MA 02111

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New Business & Media
Danielle@essential-design.com

Careers
HR@essential-design.com

Sr. Mechanical Engineer

Internships
Interns@essential-design.com

General Inquiries
Telephone 617 338 6057

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Research

Discovery

Definition

Strategy

Vision

Planning

Development

Design

Engineering

Consumer

AARP

Research: Discovery

Altec Lansing

Research: Discovery

Strategy: Vision

Development: Design

Development: Engineering

Dell

Development: Design

Klipsch

Strategy: Vision

Development: Design

Development: Design

Development: Engineering

Moen

Research: Discovery

Research: Definition

Development: Design

Puma

Development: Design

Development: Engineering

Development: Design

Pyrex

Research: Discovery

Development: Design

Saris

Research: Definition

Zink

Strategy: Vision

Development: Design

Healthcare

Curbell

Strategy: Planning

Development: Design

Development: Engineering

Genzyme

Research: Discovery

Strategy: Vision

Haemonetics

Research: Definition

IDEXX

Research: Definition

Development: Design

Lipid Sciences

Development: Design

Development: Engineering

Philips

Development: Design

Sensix

Strategy: Vision

WellDoc

Research: Discovery

Strategy: Planning

Development: Design

Commercial

Dell

Strategy: Vision

Development: Design

Development: Design

EMC

Development: Design

Fishman

Strategy: Vision

Development: Design

Harvard

Research: Discovery

Strategy: Planning

Legrand

Research: Discovery

Research: Definition