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By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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ZEELAND — It’s one thing for industrial designers to make recommendations to entrepreneurs and product developers about easing the path of commercialization for a given product, and it’s quite another for the designers to actually embark on that process for themselves.

The choice to take a product from concept to market was a purposeful one for Jon Moroney and his colleagues at Tiger Design Studio, started about a decade ago by Luciano Hernandez. The industrial design group had always wanted to find and develop its own products, but it was careful to not rush into it.

Jon Moroney, industrial designer at Tiger Design Studio in Zeeland, works with a prototype of a new medical device, an oxygen flow diverter, that the company is bringing to market. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

For years, the company had broadened industrial design to be more entrepreneurial so it could bridge the traditional disconnect for designers. If done right, commercializing their own products would give the designers crucial insights into the product development process, lessons that would help them serve clients better, Moroney said.

“We had been doing industrial design for 10 years. As the definitions (of design) changed, the scope of our capabilities changed, and we looked at sales and marketing and partnerships with manufacturers,” Moroney told MiBiz. “Three years ago, we said, ‘Why not do this for ourselves?’ We had all the capabilities and partnerships. We could take a product to market ourselves if we found the right situation. We did that in part to diversify the revenue for our company, and in part because there’s a lot to learn about taking a product to market, and we could pass that on to our small- to medium-sized (customers).

“We wanted to find the simplest idea that makes the biggest impact. We took the approach that we wanted to develop a product portfolio and identify a potential product that would be simple and be manufactured and developed with the partnerships we had.”

They found a winner with a medical device developed by Nancy Wall, a respiratory therapist at Zeeland Community Hospital. She had come up with the concept for an oxygen flow diverter that could be used in patient rooms for those who had respiratory conditions.

In the past, when a therapist wanted to treat a patient using a nebulizer, she would have to disconnect the typical oxygen tubes from the wall. The adapters, made from plastic, had a tendency to cross thread, and connecting and reconnecting the various products took time away from a therapist’s actual treatment.

Wall’s idea was to develop a valve that a therapist could toggle between the regular oxygen bottle and the tubes for the nebulizer while leaving all of the parts connected. Even though the usual process might only take minutes, a couple of minutes can be a long time for a patient who’s having difficulty breathing, Moroney said. And in a busy small community hospital, time is of the utmost importance.

Moroney said Wall had put a great deal of time and money into protecting her idea, and she came to Tiger Studio with some rough proof of concept prototypes.

“It wasn’t a product yet. It was a concept that needed to be developed into a product,” he said. “Where we started was we took the information she gave us and validated that end users would use it as she intended, would get value as she intended.”

The team of designers researched the hospital environment and various scenarios and then moved into “traditional industrial design-type activities.” They then pulled in Keystone Solutions Group, a Kalamazoo-based product development and manufacturing company with which Tiger Studio had a long relationship. Keystone fit in particular because the group had a history with commercializing medical devices.

“(Keystone) had the local manufacturing capacity to make this product. We wanted to make it locally, and they had a knowledge in fluid dynamics and … could engineer and manage it,” Moroney said. “They were a really good fit.”

Keystone’s influence can be seen as the product progressed and its size shrunk over the course of the development stage. At the same time, the designers ensured that users could still be able to determine how the device was functioning from across a typical patient room.

“We were pushing this way and they were pushing that way and we came to a happy medium and wrapped it up,” he said.

Once the product was nearly ready, the partners took a step back and enlisted some mentoring help from medical professionals at Spectrum Health, who provided feedback on the prototypes. Their suggestions resulted in some changes to the product before it went to the pre-production stage.

Overall, the process took about a year to go from Wall’s concept to a product that’s ready to be shipped to customers. But the timeline wasn’t necessarily linear since certain stages — FDA approval, tooling, and so on — took weeks or months to materialize. But while those processes were taking shape, the group was also working the sales and distribution channels to be ready for when approval ultimately came and production started — as well as working on products and research for other clients.

“We couldn’t tell someone that this is the best way. We had to follow through ourselves,” he said. “We took the time to make sure we knew what the feedback meant and to manage our risk.”

In the future, he said Tiger Studio would like to continually have one or two products in the development stage. If the development side of the business, dubbed Tiger Lab, takes root, it could be spun off as its own business unit.

“It’s definitely not a traditional case study, but we want to share this because we feel industrial design has an important role in the economy and helping to develop a different thought process in manufacturing and industry in general. The role is changing quite a bit. We want to help grow and evolve what industrial design can be,” he said.