Accelerating cleantech hardware product development

Startups in the Cleantech sector have historically had poor return on investment and high failure rates when compared with the medical or software sectors. One reason given for the disappointing outcomes of many Cleantech companies is slow product development (PD) and cycles of learning. In this thesis, I explore the major bottlenecks in hardware product development (PD) including slow cycles of learning, especially in Cleantech. I then develop technical and operational interventions to help overcome these obstacles. I accomplish this through 55 interviews with hardware startup chief executive and chief technology officers worldwide and subsequent analysis of the data from these conversations. By analyzing this data, I find ways to accelerate the innovation process and work toward applying these to Cleantech hardware product development. First, I find that prototyping is the largest time sink for hardware startups with a median of 2.5 years.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Looney, Erin Elizabeth.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ian Marius Peters, Tonio Buonassisi and Maria Yang.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/127056

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/127056