Foster-Miller Highlights Product Development Collaboration with New TeamSource Service
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Waltham, MA (October 26, 2005) - With internal engineering capabilities shrinking within today's industry-leading companies, the need for external product and equipment development expertise has never been greater. TeamSourceSM, the latest in a series of branded Innovation Express services from Foster-Miller, highlights the company's collaborative approach to helping companies realize new innovations from project concept to manufactured product. As one of America's leading proprietary product and process equipment development companies, Foster-Miller serves as an extension of customers' engineering capabilities.
One of the most powerful advantages of TeamSource is Foster-Miller's ability to transfer expertise across applications and industries. What may be a traditional solution in one industry can be a wholly novel approach in another. Foster-Miller's 50 years of applied experience in numerous disciplines such as medical, electrical, thermal, chemical, software, robotics and materials, provides a large reservoir of know-how from which client companies can draw. This collaboration across industries has facilitated the development of many successful breakthrough products.
At Foster-Miller, teaming plays a role in every phase of product development from identification and prioritization of customer needs to full-scale product manufacture. Secrecy, confidentiality and IP protection are at the core of this service, which was founded on the principle that new product development plans are safest in the hands of a trusted partner who does not have a stake in a particular process or machine, and who is not an obvious target for recruitment by competitors.
"With expertise across numerous scientific and engineering disciplines, the knowledge and capabilities that Foster-Miller can provide go well beyond what companies can feasibly maintain in-house," says Ed Goldman, senior vice president at Foster-Miller. "TeamSource reinforces the need for a combined internal and external approach to product development, while shielding in-house staff from many of the demands and responsibilities of managing such projects."
The TeamSource service is most apparent during the ideation phase, where brainstorming, market foresight and multidisciplinary knowledge come together to create concepts for truly novel solutions. However, TeamSource benefits the entire product development process by:
oCreating a powerful brainstorming environment;
oEnabling technology transfer between industries;
oProviding the highest level of IP protection and confidentiality;
oGiving companies immediate access to hundreds of multidisciplined engineers; and
oKeeping in-house staff focused on core competencies.
For example, teaming is critical during testing and evaluation as well as the manufacturing system development phase of Innovation Express, where knowledge about real-oworld production conditions is shared between internal and external resources.
TeamSource and the entire Innovation Express suite of services are aimed at helping companies achieve true innovation, not simple product modification. True innovation is the result of not one, but many changes that impact the entire product experience, ranging from smell to shape to package design. Innovation Express services also encompass the development of proprietary processes to manufacture new products, which create additional barriers for competition.
About Foster-Miller
Foster-Miller, Inc. (Waltham, MA), one of the premiere product and equipment design companies in America, is a single-source provider of process and equipment innovations that help companies in a wide range of industries attain market success. Foster-Miller helps companies formulate ideas and design new products through innovative manufacturing concepts and the development of custom equipment. The company is an independent, privately heldcompany founded in 1956 by three MIT graduates. It has a staff of more than 315 employees, composed of mechanical, electrical, thermal, chemical, nuclear, aerospace, software and materials engineers, as well as physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and biologists. It has offices in Washington, DC and Albany, New York. The company was named one of the most innovative businesses in America by Inc. magazine in August 2002. To learn more about Foster-Miller's services, please visit foster-miller.com.
Foster-Miller, Inc. is a subsidiary of QinetiQ North America, Inc., part of the worldwide QinetiQ group of companies, a U.K.-based 10,000-employee engineering firm.
