CUSTOMER-DRIVEN INNOVATION: ONE COMPANY’S WINNING RECIPE Spring Loaded Technology
osteoarthritis. With an aging and increasingly obese population, mobility issues involving the knee will only increase. Such statistics might inspire some entrepre- neurs to head straight to the drawing board, but Spring Loaded’s founders knew better. Dalhousie University’s Starting Lean program draws on the methodology espoused by author Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup. Here, the first question to answer is not whether a product can be built, but instead, whether it should be built. Is there sufficient market interest to support a sus- tainable business? “We spent four months in the Starting Lean program, talking to potential custom- ers,” Cowper Smith says. “When you are a hardware start up, and you don’t have a product that works yet and can’t proto- type at a low cost, you have to spend a lot of time talking to customers and validating the market to find out if there would be a demand for what you want to build.” A STRATEGY THAT’S PAYING DIVIDENDS “The first pitch we made outside of the class
By BDC
When the founders of Halifax’s Spring Loaded Technology first met, they had something impor- tant in common—problem knees.
At the time, Chris Cowper Smith was doing his PhD work on motor control and movement in the human body. His co founder, Bob Garrish, had a background in mechanical engineering.
“When you are a hardware start up, and you don’t have a product that works yet and can’t prototype at a low cost, you have to spend a lot of time talking to customers and validating the market to find out if there would be a demand for what you want to build.” “We intuitively understood how big of a problem the human knee poses and we wanted to explore that further,” says Cowper Smith, the company’s President and CEO. Cowper Smith met Garrish in Dalhousie University’s Starting Lean program. FINDING THE RIGHT SOLUTION It was an engineering challenge that had stymied others for decades. Existing products on the market only provided joint stability and were typically bulky and expensive. The two entrepreneurs wanted to develop a more affordable device that could also restore mobility and enhance athletic performance, with a compact design that could fit under clothing. Three years later, after 15 design iterations, Spring Loaded Technology is poised to bring to market the world’s first bionic knee brace technology. The company takes its name from the unique spring mechanism in the brace, which was inspired by an aircraft’s landing gear The next step is mass commercialization. To maintain quality control and protect the company’s trade secrets, Spring Loaded Technology is keeping manufacturing and assembly in house. However, this requires a new investment in manufacturing equipment and processes. PREPARING FOR MANUFACTURING Spring Loaded’s launch plan received a boost in June, when Cowper Smith, 31, claimed the $100,000 Grand Prize in BDC’s Young Entrepreneur Award contest. Spring Loaded will use its prize to invest in new systems for rapid fibre and composites manu- facturing. In this way, the company can increase production output by a factor of six and drive economies of scale that will reduce production costs per unit. These savings will be passed on to customers. R&D DRIVEN BY MARKET NEED Up to 60% of sports related injuries involve the knee and 45% of us can expect to develop knee The two men decided to build a better knee brace—a “bionic” knee brace.
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SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS • MAY 2016
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