Cover; Half-title; Title page; Copyright information; Epigraph; Table of contents; Preface; Acknowledgments; Week 1 Create Value in Three Phases; 1 Engineers Create Value for Investors; Why This Book? What Is the Book's Theme?; Case Study 1; A Value Creator on the Shark Tank Show; Case Study 2; GoldieBlox -- a Massive Value Creator; Technological Innovation and Innovators; 2 Introduction to Technological Innovation; Innovation: What Is It?; Think of Engineers/Scientists as Value Creators; 3 The Seven Phases of Technological Innovation; Why the Seven-Phased Model?, Convincing Engineers to Make a StartTechnological Innovation: Not a One-Person Journey; Pre-Start-Up Phases: Invention and Planning Phases; Caveat; Cash-Flow-Based Graphical Representation of the Seven Phases; Negative Cash Flow during Pre-Start-Up; The Importance of Pre-Start-Up Phases 1-3; 4 Engineers Add Value in Stages; Value Creation by the Engineer/Scientist-Entrepreneur; How an Engineer's Idea Grows in Value in Early Phases; 5 Disruptive Technological Innovators: Value Creators; The Importance of the Innovator; Tests for Disruptive Innovators., Week 2 Phase 1 Create Value Through a New Idea Finding Your Idea6 Ideas: How Do You Find Them?; An Idea Gets the Ball Rolling; Ideas: An Engineer's Strength; Where Do Ideas Come From?; Deliberate Observation to Stimulate Idea Generation; Do Not Discard "Simple" Ideas; Brainstorming for Creative Thinking; Weeks 3-4 Phase 2 Creating a Product; 7 Turn Your Idea into a Product; Viable Products Spring from Only a Few Ideas; Example of an Award-Winning Product; Products Are Defined by Multidimensional Functions; Products Have Features too; Use the Customer as Your Design Partner., Practical New Product DevelopmentThe Importance of Customer Input before You Design; The Survey; Getting Reliable Customer Input; Number of Customers Surveyed; Other Inputs to Seek; 8 Early Detection of Market Potential; The Current State of Market Research for Entrepreneurs; Reducing Your Market Risk; Developing and Testing Value Propositions; Grocery Example: Testing of Value Propositions; Expanded Surveys; Summary; 9 Illustrative Case: Tennis Racquet Customer-Needs Survey; The Tennis Racquet Case; Number of Respondents to Your Survey; 10 What Engineers Can Do for Product Development., and What Engineers Can OfferSubstitution; Product Improvement over Time; How to Design and Develop Better Products?; Engineering Design Principles; Week 5 Patenting and Protecting Your Intellectual Property; 11 Intellectual Property, Patents, and Trade Secrets; What Is a Patent?; Types of Patents (According to the USPTO); What May Be Patented? (According to the USPTO); What Cannot Be Patented? (According to the USPTO); Provisional and Nonprovisional Utility Patents; Patent Search; What Do You Get with an Issued Patent?; When to File a Patent Application?; What Can You Learn from Issued Patents?
