The Live Edge Contest is an excellent forum for seeing if your idea has merit on an international scale. You are pitting your design against 3500 others (last year) and before an esteemed panel of judges. If you pass this test, then you can be assured the design is worth pursuing both personally and as a business. The award is significant and actually useful since you also keep your intellectual property. We found the Farnell team and its subsidiaries to be trustworthy and professional with the information given to them. The other significant benefit from winning is the visibility on the Internet. If I type my name into Google, my two contest wins appear magically. The internet has a long memory. Our CFO discovered us when he typed my partners name into Google and got interested in what he was up to; very powerful. Plus, the plaque looks good in our conference room.

The product we entered into the contest was a new LED based light. Its application is for general overhead lighting in commercial and residential markets. The trick with LEDs is handle the heat they generate and design the electronic ballast to work properly at high temperatures with a long life. The other challenge is to providing full dimming without audible noise, visible flicker, or current flicker in the power supplies. Just imagine a large installation with a hundred lights all being dimmed to the same level. One, the lights must track each other in light output. Two, the lights must be silent in operation.

The other aspect of good design is manufacturability. Can you make a million of these things efficiently? Can you make them economically? Price is critical for any product to be successful. When you design always imagine who will be using your product. How will they interact with it? Put yourself into the shoes of the people installing and maintaining your products over their full life.

Being GREEN means to take care of all the details so that all along the product chain you stay GREEN! Take for instance the Compact Fluorescent Light. This light is being heralded as a GREEN revolution in lighting. It replaces older incandescent that screw into the Edison socket. It is GREEN only in its efficacy or lumens/watt performance. The rest of the product is a nightmare. It is fragile and is easily broken. It contains mercury and must be disposed of as hazardous waste. Go read the DOE (Department of Energy) recommendations on how handle a broken bulb. The light doesn’t dim and its life is very short compared to LEDs. And yet, it is the darling of the lighting world on paper. Talk to people and they hate them.

So design a product which really takes into account the impact your product will have on the environment over its full life and its death. What do we do with it now? Our product is made of recyclable aluminum; the rest is fully RoHS compliant. The little part that can’t be recycled can be safely disposed without concern.

To be honest, I didn’t actually take the contest seriously enough. I entered on the next to the last day and didn’t submit my design until the very last day with just 3 hours to prepare. I also didn’t read all the rules and really consider the people that were judging the design. I made many assumptions about what they were interested in seeing, and was wrong. I believe we didn’t win because I failed to truly communicate the impact the design would have worldwide. So given this sloppy attitude, I will try to convey to you the right way to go about winning this contest.

Here are few suggestions to help you win, not just place, like we did:

• Enter your application at least a week before the final day. This gives Farnell a chance to respond that they received your entry application. It takes them about 2 days. In my case, I had no idea if I actually was entered until after the deadline. Not too smart.

• Read all the rules, the document format, and write several revisions to clean up your presentation and fine tune it to the audience who will judge its merit. Not just once, very quickly, and send it away like we did.

• Study the judge’s background and try to imagine what will appeal to each one of them. See what they have accomplished in their careers and target your language to appeal to them. I assumed they were engineers studying a very cool design. Not the case.

• This is a contest for “green” products: efficient, safe, ecological, practical, and real. Keep that in mind. Translate all your numbers into pounds of CO2 saved, cars removed from the road, barrels of oil not burned, landfill impact, Cost of Ownership arguments. Make your argument about the impact of your design when used on a mass scale and clearly state the impact worldwide. Do all this work for them, don’t leave it to their imaginations or expect them work the numbers for you. Do your homework, make it easy for them see the impact your product will have on the energy crisis and the environment.

• Do a professional job on the documentation, format the document, use graphs, use pictures, and make your point.

Here are some more hints:

• There are two judging stages. The first team judges the technical merit of the design and judge if it is a real product and how good it is. If you get past this phase, you are on a short list. Just remember, these folks are looking at thousands of documents and must make a quick assessment of the viability of your design. Make your presentation simple, and to the point so they get it.

• The second phase involves the final panel of judges who are looking past the technical aspects of the design and focused more on its application worldwide. Their focus is what impact this product will have on the energy crisis, etc. Here’s where you stop being the engineer and more the politician. Concentrate on the social and economic benefits of your design. Don’t assume they know anything; tell them everything you want them to know and to understand.

Inteltech Corporation is just about ready to launch our first product in America for the American market. The European markets will follow once we get some experience. If I would have taken this contest more seriously, then I believe the product would have gotten a substantial boost in marketability and a more European presence. Most of all enjoy the process and don’t be discouraged if you don’t win. Just make sure it wasn’t your fault.

Good Luck,
Dale Stepps
Vice President
Inteltech Corporation
dale.stepps@intelechcorp.com