Award-winning design engineer Nigel Sharplin is one of the speakers at the New Zealand MobileTECH conference in Rotorua on March 30 and 31.
The conference brings together technology leaders from all primary sectors and is showcasing new technologies designed to increase the productivity of primary food and fibre industries.
Sharplin says high volume tech manufacturing is viable in New Zealand when the design is simple to assemble and automated, where possible.
One of his start-up companies Fibre-gen won the New Zealand Innovators Award for the agribusiness and environment category for its Hitman PH330 last year.
This technology integrates acoustic measurement systems into harvester/processor heads to enable forestry contracting crews to segregate automatically logs by internal wood properties allowing forest owners to maximise the value of their forests, log by log, safely without having men on the ground at risk.
Earlier in his career, Sharplin was a mechanical design manager at Fisher & Paykel leading the Smart Drive team responsible for design management.
He says F&P taught him about innovation and the importance of next generation thinking for next-generation products.
“Fisher & Paykel are so far out in front of the competitors, their product designs last for more than 20+years before being superceded, says Sharplin.
In 1998, he founded InFact, a design consultancy that specialises in commercialising innovative new hi-tech products, bringing customer need, technology, marketing strategy, intellectual property requirements and specialised manufacturing together to provide the resource for early stage tech companies and mature businesses.
He has directed numerous projects, the best of which have been awarded prestigious international Edison (USA), Red Dot and GOOD Design awards including first aid kits Clever Medkit’s online medical cabinet, Invacare’s Shark powered wheelchair remote and drive system and Metro Txt-to-park parking meters.
“Organisations and companies need to find out why they are relevant to their customers. It’s about your end user believing what you believe. The more value you create for your end users, the more value you achieve for your business,” Sharplin says.
“To gain momentum, all the stakeholder needs of the value stream need to be aligned. We use design-thinking to help organisations establish clarity about these sets of needs,” he says.
It’s a robust methodology that enables teams to understand what to do and why this is relevant to the end user,” says Sharplin.
