Innovation for leaders
Essential is the design innovation partner for leaders seeking to accelerate business success. We are a focused team of research, design and engineering professionals, whose design thinking methods inform and translate strategy into breakthrough products and services.
How do you make smart decisions in complex situations where speed to market is critical to success? You need good information – derived from end-users, markets and trends; considered in context, with assumptions and risks clearly identified.
Essential uses innovative research and analysis processes to create a deep understanding of stakeholder needs. We provide complete and actionable information that answers questions like, “What are our next great opportunities?” and “What is our precise target for success?”
Our discovery research reveals unmet demands and illuminates market gaps for product and service innovation. Using a wide range of ethnographic and participatory design-research tools, we identify fresh opportunities by exposing underlying needs, desires and goals that can otherwise go undiscovered.
Our definition research puts new opportunities under the magnifying glass to give them greater clarity and context. We help you understand opportunities from multiple perspectives to align priorities, focus strategy and direct development. Our definition research deliverables delineate new opportunities insightfully and precisely to give you a competitive advantage.
A well-defined and articulated opportunity is the starting point for strategy. We approach business strategy as the design process of devising and implementing a plan to achieve a clear, shared marketing goal.
As your strategy partners, we transform insights into actionable vision and tangible plans that gain traction across your organization.
Combining experience with foresight, leaders envision their role in future markets, then build compelling cases to invest in and exploit those opportunities. Essential helps companies align internal and external business forces to visualize and develop a unique approach to a specific opportunity. We use design thinking processes to create scenarios for future product and service opportunities, frame competitive positioning, articulate brand promises and, most importantly, illustrate opportunities in ways that inform, engage and excite stakeholders.
Turning opportunities into successful offers requires a foolproof plan for implementation Essential’s strategy planning processes create product and service roadmaps, define channel requirements, outline development tactics and anticipate marketing communication needs. In short, we do the work to answer the question “What steps are required for our strategy to succeed?”
Thoughtful research and clear strategy are critical to success. But passion and development experience are also required to transform plans into new products and services that are engaging, desirable, robust and profitable.
Essential’s design and engineering teams give form to user experiences by developing products and services that are on-strategy, on-point with users and customers, and on-target to hit performance requirements necessary for success.
Our industrial, interaction and service design teams create beautiful, easy-to-use products and services. By integrating design into research and strategy processes, we are extremely successful at addressing strategic imperatives while creating compelling designs that appeal to the emotions, have a high degree of usability and solve problems in elegant ways.
Our engineering teams provide the technical, manufacturing, sourcing and project management work necessary to bring your offer to market. We actively manage partners’ inputs, integrating electrical, software and firmware requirements into robust development prototypes and production databases. We see and address risks before they impact schedule. And we ensure that the time and effort you invest in your design vision makes its way into production and into the market.
To succeed in fast-moving, highly competitive markets for consumer products and services, you need outstanding targeting skills and ever more advanced delivery skills. Speed to market is critical — but only when you deliver the products and services that people truly desire.
What makes one product or service cool? When is it smart to offer multiple SKUs? How far can you extend a single platform? What makes an application “killer”? What does it take to excite the channel?
Finding answers to questions like these is the real art in design — and it is the way we approach creating connections to consumers that go deeper than just form and function.
In addition to the work
highlighted above, our
team has experience with:
Bic
Escort
Franklin
Gillette
iRobot
Jarden
Kyocera
P&G
Pepper Computer
Polaroid
Sanford
SCJohnson
TDK
World Kitchen
How do you design a good teacher?
AARP wanted to reach beyond its traditional demographic and capture the minds and sensibilities of a younger generation. Although this generation is in prime position to build a secure future for itself, it is in many cases also saddled by debt…
How important is music to you?
To reveal new product opportunities for immediate and long-term iPod docking, mobile and PC audio products, Essential led a global research effort to extend Altec’s knowledge of ideal listening contexts by exploring the role of music in people’s lives…
Essential conducted discovery research designed to inform the strategic planning process. We worked with Altec Lansing to apply our structured insights…
Essential strategy work drove the design of a new family of docking and portable audio products with use-driven features built around defined product platforms…
CES Design & Engineering Award
Essential’s engineering team supported overseas Altec Lansing manufacturing suppliers by developing and implementing creative, appropriate solutions to various engineering, manufacturing and assembly issues as they arose…
How different should your mass-market products be?
To grow their position in key mass-retail channels, Klipsch recognized the need to develop new products that more closely aligned their brand with lifestyle-driven consumers…
Klipsch recognized that they needed to extend their product offer to address and capitalize on the rapid adoption rate of flat panel televisions…
CES Innovations award
Excite Custom Retailer Award
Business Week IDEA Finalist
To launch a new wireless technology platform, Essential worked with Klipsch to develop a unique and meaningfully different design language that established a new aesthetic vision for this category of Lifestyle products…
CES Innovations award
Electronic House
Business Week IDEA Finalist
By identifying key technical risks and providing rich conceptual-engineering deliverables, Essential actively advised Klipsch in directing their final development efforts overseas…
Are you selling a product or an experience?
Essential was asked to uncover opportunities in shower experience design and translate that into new product opportunities…
Using proprietary design research co-creation techniques, Essential helped Moen establish a product platform for future kitchen faucet development based on end-user-driven parameters…
The Moen Cascata lavatory faucet was conceived as an expression of natural water flow to create a more engaging product experience. Water flow is controlled by tipping the spout itself—like tipping a pitcher of water…
Good Design
Spark! Award
Fashion Technology is an idea about innovation where function transcends utility and becomes the driving visual brand identity feature…
Puma asked Essential to take the SpiderCell concept and develop it into an engineered, manufacturable component…
Essential updated the highly effective Puma Duocell technology by moving away from the “mechanical” look of perfect hexagons…
What innovation opportunities will revitalize interest in your brand—while staying within consumers’ parameters for acceptable brand elasticity?
A market gap in food preparation was selected by Pyrex as a high-value opportunity in which Pyrex could bring innovation to its core line of measuring cups and mixing bowls. The Essential goal was to “mix” the core values of Pyrex and “spice up” the category…
Good Design Award
How would you respond to a new player entering your market with a game-changing technology?
As a power-training technology provider, Saris Cycling Group chose Essential to redesign its core offer as a new competitor brought GPS functionality into the category…
What is required to characterize a new technology and make it relevant in new markets?
ZINK is a new technology platform that enables printing in full color without the need for ink cartridges or ribbons…
How do you express the value of a disruptive new technology in tangible ways?
To communicate opportunities for ZINK, a new inkless printing technology, Essential developed multiple product architectures to reflect the scalability of the technology across a broad suite of potential applications…
The most successful healthcare delivery devices and interactive solutions simplify complex technology and present benefits in the most natural way possible.
Of the many roles we take on when partnering with clients, our most valuable contribution is as a “technological interpreter.” For physicians and technicians, we interpret technologies as features that enhance control, speed and accuracy. For patients and homecare providers, we create convenience, simplicity and error elimination. For client teams, we meet market, channel and manufacturing needs.
Our process focuses on design control to drive robust results, but it’s our approach and our experience as skilled “translators” that differentiates our contribution.
In addition to the work
highlighted above, our
team has experience with:
Acme Medical
Advoy
Alkermes
ACMI
Bard
Baxter
Becton, Dickinson & Co.
Boston Scientific
Chemical Abstracts Services
Dade-Behring
Davol
Dentovations
Eli Lilly
GSK
IEC
Insulet
J&J Ethicon
Kendall
Lifeline Systems
Millipore
Neurometrix
Novartis
Osteonics
Ortho Biotech
Patient Keeper
Smith & Nephew
Uromed
US Genomics
Zeiss
Zymequest
How do you express barriers to success in ways that motivate cross-functional action?
Since Curbell invited Essential to actively collaborate on design and engineering projects, a deeper dialog about process, structure, and management factors that influence success has evolved…
How do you inject new life into your product line and development process at the same time?
Curbell asked Essential to help them do just that. Having identified emerging worldwide healthcare trends poised to threaten their leadership position, Curbell tapped Essential to bring a fresh approach in developing the first commercially available IPX-7 nurse call button.
In the process, Essential helped drive fundamental changes in Curbell’s product development process, reducing time to market by more than 50%.
Getting products to market quickly requires sweating the details. Essential’s engineering team worked closely with Curbell’s quality, regulatory and sourcing teams to ensure that product and project risks were identified, mitigated and documented under design control procedures, resulting in a robust, compliant, innovative product in less time.
How do you establish a patient-centered point of view when most of your patients are not yet diagnosed?
Based on the desires of health care specialists, Essential created a series of dashboard views and reports wizards for patients, clinicians, researchers, regulators and payers…
How do you align priorities across disciplines, user segments and markets?
We often help our clients discover market and user needs and craft a vision for their new product development efforts. We can also help our clients confirm their vision and even prioritize competing visions held by respective stakeholders.
As the industry-leading blood management company Haemonetics initiated a key new program…
How should a diagnostic device accommodate unique user needs and workplace protocols?
To understand the range of issues that contribute to best practices, ease of use and enhanced workflow efficiency, Essential collected data…
Successfully integrating the latest diagnostic technologies into a new device that emphasizes usability and efficiency equally is no small challenge…
How early in the process can design spark interest in a business opportunity?
Essential collaborated with Lipid Sciences to give form to their technology…
The Essential engineering team led a fast-tracked co-development effort with Lipid Sciences to establish a mechanical platform design that could simultaneously support Essential design vision work…
How do you adjust your offer when transitioning from a lead-user segment to the mass market?
As an information service provider, WellDoc has effected dramatic improvements in diabetic patient outcomes…
Essential identified important attitudinal and behavior differences among patients and their doctors and identified ways in which these parameters might intersect.
Essential championed the notion that WellDoc products should “behave” with a personality…
Essential modified a mobile phone application to simplify data entry (blood sugar readings and medications) and made adjustments to alert messaging…
Business-to-business relationships succeed on a combination of trust and value. To create innovative commercial products and services, we pay attention to the critical details of brand expression, business partner needs and stakeholder value along the total value chain.
Rather than focusing strictly on product features, we often contribute true innovation at the buyer/seller interaction level. What interactive systems could enhance your relationship with customers? How can we magnify the impact of the user experience? Where can we engage our customers in the development process to ensure their acceptance?
By taking a more thoughtful approach to business-level transactions, we innovate in important ways.
In addition to the work
highlighted above, our
team has experience with:
AIQ
Brady
Boston Retail Products
C&D Technologies
Cecropia
Cooper Perkins
Imation
New Product Innovations
Peer Insight
Pitney Bowes
Raymarine
RDVO
Sapient
Vast
How do you leverage your partner’s capabilities?
Dell’s design group employs Essential to uncover and develop new ideas for design innovation. Our close partnership…
Dell recognized that a cohesive design language would contribute significantly to the success of their next-generation enterprise product family and engaged Essential to help them…
Dell was developing a new business-class platform to offer a more highly featured and ruggedized product to true road warriors in tough physical environments…
How do you account for the value of design when the product image is your brand image?
Safe data is fundamental to business success…
How much influence should design have on a technology company’s strategy?
Fishman Transducers was in the process of shifting their growth model from an OEM-focused integrated technology provider to the acoustic musician’s favorite…
For professional acoustic-guitar players, subtle variations in tone matter. So do users’ demands for on-the-fly control. The Fishman acoustic imaging technologies that serve these needs are truly state-of-the-art…
iF Product Design Award
RedDot Product Design Award
Business Week IDEA Finalist
Good Design Award
CES Design & Engineering Award
What is meaningful content?
Working in collaboration with Sapient, Essential designed and conducted research with Harvard alumni to…
Essential identified, prototyped and validated an approach to personalization that delivered on Harvard’s business criteria and addressed user needs…
What growth opportunities allow you to leverage your unique strengths?
Most manufacturing companies take a technology-driven approach to answering this question—and to new product development in general…
Capturing the voice of the customer isn’t enough.
Customers can only say so much, and what they say is often very different from what they do. This requires highly informed investigation into customer behaviors…
Can product architecture innovation reframe pricing and margin structures?
Lexicon selected Essential to reposition their best-in-class recording studio brand as a technology-design leader in home recording…
RedDot Product Design Award
Music Tech Choice Award
Engaging retailers during the development process can help ensure success, but only if you deliver on expectations—and deliver quickly.
To meet retailers’ desire for pricing flexibility, Essential worked closely with Lexicon…
How can design thinking provide value to an “invisible” new home construction component?
As a piece of plastic that covers a hole in the roof and is then covered by shingles, the passive ridge vent didn’t have a very appealing “personality”…
Essential worked with Owens Corning to develop a line of next-generation residential roof vents that responded to varying needs of contractors around the country. Using design-driven development methodologies…
Innovation expertise involves knowing where to innovate—and where not to.
Essential research efforts pinpointed critical usability conventions in wireless live audio contexts that, if injudiciously “improved,” could introduce unacceptable risk…
If you want to express technological mastery, you must demonstrate technological sophistication where it is expected. And then, you need to go deeper…
Good Design Award
Desire for commercial attributes can translate to huge opportunities in consumer markets. Shure’s professional users required great sound but they couldn’t get it for their iPods…
iF Product Design Award
BusinessWeek IDEA Award
Since salespeople aren’t end users, should you engage them in the design process?
The short answer is yes, but how they engage directly affects the value of their input…
What new market segment will give you growth potential without distracting you from your core market?
In our work for Wright Line, Essential identified and evaluated the business potential of new target markets…
If your brand values aren’t reflected in your products, customers sense the disconnect and will look elsewhere the next time they buy.
To deliver on Wright Line’s technical furniture promise…
Systems products demand clever engineering to achieve maximum platform flexibility while meeting numerous—and often conflicting—design requirements…
Essential Events & Awards
2010The Mix Digital Boombox for iPhone and iPod, created for Altec Lansing, won a CES Innovations Award at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in the Audio Accessories Category.
The MIX is a ‘next generation’ Digital Boombox for the way music enthusiasts play and share their music in a social context. It responds to a key personna identified in the research — the ‘defacto DJ’ who genuinely likes to get the party started.
Essential is a carefully chosen team of world-class researchers, designers and engineers who share quality and service
values that drive us to develop category-leading products and services.
Director of Research
Senior consultant leading Essential’s research efforts in product and service discovery and definition. Maps strategy opportunities and drives development agendas. Expert in the translation of user and channel inputs into design requirements for hardware, software, web interaction, device interaction, and service development projects.
Prior to Essential: Fitch, Scient, and independent consulting.
Associations: DMI
Education: Masters of Design, Institute of Design/Illinois Institute of Technology, A. B. Davidson College
Essential
143 South Street
6th Floor
Boston MA 02111
New Business & Media
Danielle@essential-design.com
Careers
HR@essential-design.com
Internships
Interns@essential-design.com
General Inquiries
Telephone 617 338 6057
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