The Business of Engineering: Understanding the Role of Business in the Successful Development and Implementation of Engineering Tools

In today’s world, success stories of software companies are becoming more and more common. The first tech giants of Facebook and Twitter stormed the world and quickly raked in millions if not billions of dollars. Taking inspiration from these companies thousands of young software engineers set out into the world trying to sell their own software. Some of these people would become successful, but the vast majority would fall short and instead meet bankruptcy. The question arises, what is the difference between those who succeeded and those who failed? Why is it that some inventions become insanely successful while others lead to nothing? The answer does not solely lie in the invention itself but rather the business strategy and models that the inventors followed. It is not enough to simply come up with an idea, but rather one needs to know how to get their idea out to the public. This is where business comes into play. Thankfully, I was fortunate to be able to take a business innovation class at the University of Portland which taught me the important role that business plays in our world. This essay will explain the different business-based factors that are vital to pushing out inventions into the world and why these factors are so important to understand and follow.

When making an invention, many people seem to think that it is enough to make something that can solve a problem slightly better than the previously implemented solution. These inventors will usually try to make a high-tech version, which is often over-engineered, compared to an existing invention. Their new product may be superior in terms of how effective it is or maybe it is easier to use, but these products fail to become as successful as their predecessors.  Let’s take for example two products. One is a regular kitchen knife and the other is a smart kitchen knife that can tell you how to make the perfect cut and check your social media at the same time. The first thing consumers will think when they see this brand-new smart knife is “why would I want that when my normal kitchen knife cuts my food perfectly fine as is”. Their second thought will be them laughing once they realize that the smart kitchen knife is heaps more expensive than their normal knife. There is a saying that perfectly encapsulates why making some of these high-tech inventions can lead to failure. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. There is no feasible reason for a consumer to buy these inventions if the tried-and-true tested inventions of the past can do the same job just as well. Not to mention that most of these high tech and new inventions tend to cost a lot more money to manufacture and are therefore more expensive for the consumers. One of the most important lessons that business can teach you is that it isn’t enough to come up with a new idea or invention. You must remember that your invention will be competing with other existing inventions that have been around for decades if not centuries longer. So, if you want your idea or invention to be successful, they must completely blow the competition out of the water in terms of performance or in terms of economic cost. For example, a knife that never needs to be resharpened and is extremely durable will be much more appealing to buy even if it is more expensive. Or, if you make a new type of knife that is slightly more comfortable and durable but also a lot cheaper than other kitchen knives, then this knife would instantly become popular and would sell. In these examples, both knives are solving actual existing problems that current knives cannot solve. The point being that when inventing a solution, you must be sure your solution solves a major issue or is able to solve a major issue much better than any existing solution. To become successful, one must think about the design, the purpose, and the potential that comes with their product. However, having a perfect invention isn’t enough, you must also have a concrete business plan.

Another fault of many inventors in this world is that many people will come up with amazing ideas but have no way of getting their ideas out to the world. One of the most important lessons you can learn from the world of business is that you need a sound plan. You need to know how you are going to manufacture your product, how you are going to supply it to the consumers, and how you are going to advertise your product. Creating an invention is useless if you are unable to sell it, unable to make it, and unable to supply it to those who want it. Looking at the realm of computer science, let’s assume that I created some amazing invention that could change the world. Business theory says that I must think about the chain of production, which is all the steps to do with manufacturing, supplying, and advertising. For a new software invention, manufacturing is easy enough as you can just copy the software or put it on some server for it to be downloaded.  Supplying this software is a bit more complicated, but still achievable. Firstly, you must decide if you want to put your software on a third-party platform that will handle all the sales transactions and the necessary steps for consumers to download the product. This route is a lot easier to take but usually these platforms will take a decent percentage of all sales from your product. If you don’t want a third-party platform, you can create a website and buy some server space for your product. However, you must also deal with making monetary transactions on your site safe, accounting for how much traffic your site will get, and dealing with the servers that hold your product and how they will fare from massive downloads. Either way, as a seller there will always be challenges and hardships when trying to supply your software to the world. Finally, the last thing to think about is advertisements. Once you have a way to supply your customer base, you must figure out how to get that customer base to buy your product. It is important to remember that your software is just one drop in the ocean that is the internet. To market your product, you can buy advertising space on popular websites, like Reddit or Facebook, you can pay influencers to market your software, or you can take more creative approaches like making viral videos that boost the visibility of your product. The point being advertising isn’t cheap nor is it easy. To advertise your product, you need to have a decent amount of money and time on hand. The success of your advertisements dictates how much money you can earn from your product. This is why major companies will pay millions of dollars to advertise their products on certain platforms. Advertisements make products sell. All this information is important to make your product successful and it’s clear to see how complicated this whole process can be. This is exactly why so many inventions and products fail because their inventors didn’t think about the chain of production. They didn’t plan, and they just assumed a good product will always sell In terms of getting an invention out into the world, these are just a few of the important factors to consider and there are many more nuances and ideas that can really support or diminish a product’s success rate. However, in the world of software the idea of a minimum viable product reigns supreme as one of the best ways to get vital feedback on your product that can lead to your product becoming successful.

An MVP, or minimum viable product, is the idea that when creating your product, you should first make the most simplified version of your product that is ready for use and consumption. For example, the MVP of a poplar product like Photoshop could be just software that is able to move around and edit photos in the most basic form. The user interface wouldn’t be perfect, many features would be missing, and maybe the reliability of the program wouldn’t be the best. In essence, the MVP is the framework of the final product: the bare bones. The reason why the MVP is so valuable is because of the immediate and important feedback it can give. When you produce an MVP, you can quickly find out if your product is able to solve the problem or fill the niche that you are looking for. This way, you don’t need to spend years to produce a product just to find out that it can’t even solve the issue, but rather you can use an MVP to find out if your product works in just a quarter of the time. This is a huge time and money saver that can set you on the right path. Regardless of whether the MVP shows you if the product can solve the problem or not, the MVP will also give insights into any flaws that may exist within the product. With the MVP, you can have people continuously testing the software and the functionality of the product. You can see the code in action, and it becomes much easier to find any flaws, design changes, or bugs that need to be fixed. By fixing all these flaws found by the MVP, your final product will have a huge increase in quality and will be able to stand out against all those countless products with countless flaws. There is also idea common belief that the more advanced the project is, the more expensive it is to find and fix problems.  It is much easier to find and fix a bug in a software that contains only the necessary features compared to finding and fixing a bug in a software that has a million lines of code that all interweave with each other. The time and effort needed to find these bugs in the finished product is immense, which is why having an MVP is so vital because it allows you to catch these problems and fix them beforehand.

Making a successful invention is much more than coming up with an idea and building your invention. It entails an entire process of designing, planning, and prototyping. Having a solid business plan and making MVPs can be the deciding factors of whether an invention becomes mainstream or if that invention dies along with the millions of other inventions that came before. My grand challenge is “Engineering the Tools of Scientific Discovery” and the most important concept I have learned regarding a viable business is that there is no point in making a tool if it will never be used. My experience with business has taught me that creating this tool isn’t enough. I must put more thought behind my inventions, I must really think about the problems I want to solve, and I must plan out how I am going to put my inventions into the world. This competency has taught me that I can’t just look at the world from solely an engineering perspective, but I must also look at this world from the perspective of business if I ever want the tools that I create to successfully progress scientific discovery.