Jon: What are some of the ways in which you’re seeing emerging tech, whether it’s 3D printing, additive fabrication, or robotics, or the internet of things disrupting the way products are getting designed and the product design lifecycle?

Scott: Yes. We see a lot of really interesting things happening in the space, and I’ll give you just a little bit of an example or a story. When I was at iRobot where I spent 10 great years, one of the things we ended up doing is building the Roomba, and I’ll speak to this both mechanically and electrically. Mechanically, we wanted to get a working prototype to be able to understand how the robot behaved in unstructured environments, and for sales and marketing, and all that good stuff.

We would create the files, in our case, in Pro/E which is funny because not as many people use that anymore and build truly like $25,000 models of stereolithography or SLA, which was incredibly brittle, and there’s all sorts of examples of us like turning off the cliff detectors and having the robot just drive off the end of the table and shatter itself to pieces. Today, using either … You could pick MakerBot for FDM or Formlabs for SLA for much cheaper price. In fact, for a couple thousand bucks, you can actually buy your own machine and be able to create models that work even better than what we had 10 or 15 years ago at a fraction of the price at a much, much quicker iteration cycle.

Rather than having to wait say a week or two weeks to get your parts back, you can even have them back in the morning, and this lets you go much, much faster. Not only from the reduced iteration or the reduced build cycle, but also, when you’re paying $25,000 for a part, you want to make … Or for a robot, you want to make sure every last thing is perfect, so you spend a lot of time double-checking your work and that’s … It’s the old 80-20 rule, except you’re on the wrong side of it. Whereas if you can get a version in a day and it cost you a couple hundred bucks, you still want to be thorough, but you don’t need to dot every “I†and cross every “Tâ€. That just lets you go … It basically democratize the process of getting a working prototype.

On the electrical side, again, at iRobot, when we wanted to build the first circuit board to say spin the wheel modules, we had to get down in the bare metal and designer on each bridge with flyback diodes and transistors, and you’ll figure out what component to pick and actually do the hardcore engineering. It took probably a month between designing it, sending the board out, getting the board back, and writing the code just to get a simple motor to spin.

Whereas today, literally in like 20 minutes, my 7-year-old son can grab an Arduino, copy and paste some sample code, and adjust the key variables, and he’s spinning motors. There’s just been like a really interesting obstruction from the complexity of how the thing actually works to much more of a, “Let’s focus on getting the product working and not worrying as much about the details.†I think that’s incredibly enabling for the prototype.

Now, when it actually comes to building the thing in volume where you’re writing much bigger checks and you’re working with statistically larger samples where quality is important, then you definitely better understand how that stuff works, but that’s something you can push off till later after you’ve proven out that there’s a product market fit for your prototype, you’ve got the right features, the right price point. Those are just two on the electrical and mechanical side that have been key enablers.

On the software side, there’s three main things we look at. One, everybody knows about GitHub for software where it’s easy to not only keep track of it, but to share your code. The same thing exists in electrical. We love a platform called “Averterâ€, which is the same way you can share reference designs, so that you don’t need to