Development Of New Product Via Reverse Engineering

There are many situations in which a competitor has developed a technically and commercially successful product but failed to protect key aspects of this product (such as the compositions of matter that are being used in it) by establishing an adequate patent position. In such situations, usually the most cost-effective approach is to (a) deformulate the competitor's product, and then (b) "reverse engineer" a product for the client mimicking the competitor's product.

The deformulation phase of such a project is analogous to "detective work". The appropriate experiments are performed at our material testing and characterization laboratory affiliate under the direction of this consultant. We discover the types and relative amounts of the ingredients in the competitor's product, how these ingredients are put together, and how the synergy between these ingredients results in the observed desirable performance characteristics. It is best to continue a deformulation project up to some stage that can be considered optimum from the perspective of the Pareto Principle, beyond which the expenditure of additional time and money would only provide refinements with diminishing returns. This approach, pursued up to such an optimum stage of refinement, generally makes it unnecessary to perform most of the wasteful trial-and-error experimentation that would have been needed to develop the product if we were to embark upon the product R&D project without the benefit of the information provided by the deformulation.

After thus figuring out what makes the competitor's product work as it does, the expert consultant "reverse engineer" for the client a product that is very similar to (and at least as effective as) the competitor's product. Experts then prepare, test and refine prototypes until the product is ready for commercialization.

To see the resume of the expert associated with this case study, see the link below.