In the following blog, we interviewed Gener8’s Director of Engineering, David Nilson, to see how he and his team help promote collaboration and position our engineers as top commercialization experts.

In an industry where regulations are evolving, technology is advancing at breakneck speeds, and the marketplace is more competitive than ever, you want the top experts helping you every step of the way. 

Biotech instrument commercialization experts can be a massive help in this regard. The best consultants have in-depth industry knowledge, are up to date on the latest trends, market needs, and regulations, and can help you leap over common or complex pitfalls on your path to market. But oftentimes, the guidance you need is multi-faceted and requires expertise in several different areas. There may be no one consultant who has all the knowledge to help you through the entire process and constructing an internal team or team of consultants to make the journey to market with you can be time-consuming and costly.

Gener8’s Solution: Our Engineers

At Gener8, we have structured our engineering team as a versatile consulting team that’s a foundational and integral part of any customer’s medical device or industrial product development process and interfaces with every other department we have, from product design to production. When you sign onto a project, you benefit from their niche technical expertise, broad knowledge across a range of disciplines, and the experience of every other department at Gener8.

The intentional “engineering” of our engineering team helps produce the best results for our clients. Here are some ways that we promote the development of a broad engineering knowledge base through collaboration, allow our niche specialists the creative freedom to find innovative solutions, and position our engineers as top commercialization experts.

Focus on Attracting and Retaining Top Problem-Solvers

High-quality engineering requires creativity, curiosity, and the subject matter expertise to drive them. Gener8 hires many engineers with PhDs as they possess these above-mentioned traits and love to build and make things work. That gives the team a great foundation to work from and enables them to tackle and solve the complex problems that many customers face.

With that foundation, the Gener8 team focuses on the retention of their engineers by providing a balance of necessary processes and freedom to exercise their creativity or reach out to other team members and departments to pull on their expertise. All while keeping their client’s and project’s goals in mind. The opportunity to work on interesting and complex problems is intellectually stimulating for many of the engineers, which drives retention in and of itself. Altogether, Gener8’s ability to attract and keep top engineers helps build a skilled and experienced engineering team with the training to work on a large array of different problems and projects, from product design through commercialization. 

Specialized Expertise Saves Time

One of the major benefits of hiring PhDs is that they have demonstrated expertise in a specialized technology or instrument type and enables them to get up to speed quickly and demonstrate in-depth knowledge that can help solve customer’s problems.

This experience comes in handy when timelines are tight, especially if engineers understand both the engineering of a medical device instrument and the biological inner workings of an assay. For example, Gener8’s experts in assay development have run PCR-based assays on prototype instruments, enabling the internal team to quickly test if the instrument is fit for its intended use. Having this expertise under one roof saves time on having to ship prototypes to clients for testing, which can be especially time-consuming if customers are overseas.

The freedom of the engineering team at Gener8 also allows them to explore subjects outside of their area of expertise, dive into new fields, and learn from their engineering colleagues, creating a well-rounded knowledge base and the ability to approach hard problems from multiple directions. When Gener8 does not have the in-house knowledge, we pull from our strong network of consultants in Silicon Valley to provide the subject matter expertise required.

Developing Strong Mentorship

Developing expertise in other areas can only occur with strong mentorship. And Gener8 fosters this by encouraging collaborations between junior and senior engineers. Ultimately, this creates a well-rounded and flexible engineering team that can shift expertise to where it’s needed and provide clients with the breadth of experience across all of Gener8. That way, junior engineers don’t just bring their skills to a project, they bring the expertise of the senior members of the team.

Tapping into Integrated, End-to-End Solutions

Gener8’s engineers also have access to prototyping and production departments that handle the downstream product development and manufacturing stages. Ultimately, this helps avoid costly re-design as a product gets closer to production. Engineers will consult production managers, supply chain managers, new product introduction teams, or assemblers and make sure that a part that they’re thinking about in design is vetted early so that they know they can get it for a certain price and keep their costs down before they get to production.

When you start down the product development road with Gener8, you are not just hiring one person or department, you are hiring an integrated team that is using their expertise and experience to make sure your project is successful.

How Our Engineering Team Can Benefit You

Ultimately, the way we have structured our team makes for a well-rounded and flexible group with the ability to foresee and develop innovative solutions to problems. This gives us a significant advantage over hiring any one consultant or firm to handle one step in the product development process.

Check out these concrete ways in which our team can save you time and money:

• Industrial Design and Engineering Under One Roof: Our integrated team of designers and engineers make iterating different designs much faster. Our engineers are intimately involved in the industrial design process and interfacing with the product design team that performs usability testing, a process that is typically done by a third party at firms that do only industrial design.
• Fast and Efficient Engineering Analysis: Our analysts work closely with design engineers to get fast and efficient feedback on different design iterations and verification testing results. When customers use analysts outside of Gener8, analysis can be slower and sometimes misleading if the work is not integrated into the design process.
• Avoiding Software Pitfalls: Our engineers save money and improve the supply chain and operational reliability of software by using embedded microcontrollers, instead of PCs. Using a PC can cause uncertainty in product supply chain stability, operational reliability, and is more expensive to manufacture at scale.

If you want to learn more about our engineering team and how we can streamline your product development, contact us or read more about our integrated expertise.