By Montie

Editor’s note: The RTP Product Pipeline is a recent addition to WRAL Local Tech Wire. Its purpose is to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and inventors better understand the product commercialization process. Montie Roland and Vass are co-founders of the RTP Product Development Guild, Inc. Roland is also the president of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is the President of Montie Design, a product design firm in Morrisville. Their column appears weekly. MORRISVILLE – J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in the first book of his trilogy that “All that is gold does not glitter, Not all...

Editor’s note: The RTP Product Pipeline is a recent addition to WRAL Local Tech Wire. Its purpose is to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and inventors better understand the product commercialization process. Montie Roland and Vass are co-founders of the RTP Product Development Guild, Inc. Roland is also the president of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Roland is the President of Montie Design, a product design firm in Morrisville. Their column appears weekly. MORRISVILLE – Design, by it’s very nature, is an iterative process. Product design process begins with creating preconceptions. Those preconceptions are used...

Editor’s note: The RTP Product Pipeline is designed to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and inventors better understand the product commercialization process. Montie Roland and Tom Vass are co-founders of the RTP Product Development Guild, Inc. Their column appears weekly. MORRISVILLE – Last week, I had the honor of being selected as a judge for an Interactionary Design Competition held by the Triangle chapter of the Usability Professionals Association. According to author Scott Berkun, an interactionary is “an experiment in design education. The idea is to explode the process of design by forcing insane time constraints, and asking teams...

Editor’s note: The RTP Product Pipeline is a new feature for WRAL Local Tech Wire. Its purpose is to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and inventors better understand the product commercialization process. Montie Roland and Vass are co-founders of the RTP Product Development Guild, Inc. Roland is also the president of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Their column appears weekly.MORRISVILLE – The product development world, just like other industries, has its own language. One example of this “product speak” is the term product champion. Many products (and most of the very successful products) are driven...

Editor’s note: The RTP Product Pipeline is a new feature for WRAL Local Tech Wire. Its purpose is to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and inventors better understand the product commercialization process. Montie Roland and Thomas Vass are co-founders of The RTP Product Development Guild, Inc. Roland is also the president of the Carolinas Chapter of the Product Development Management Association. Their column appears weekly. MORRISVILLE – Starting a product development guild has been a journey that has lasted about two and a half years. The first two years were mainly discussions. The last five months have mainly involved...

Editor’s note: The RTP Product Pipeline is a new feature for WRAL Local Tech Wire. Its purpose is to help entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators and inventors better understand the product commercialization process. Montie Roland and Thomas Vass are co-founders of The RTP Product Development Guild, Inc. Their column appears weekly.MORRISVILLE – Our firms receives inquiries from inventors and early stage entrepreneurs fairly frequently. We tend to break down incoming inquiries into four groups: The first group is inventors. Inventors are everyday people with an idea, but no organization to backup the idea. Entrepreneurs are individuals, or a group of...