Our History
MAGNET Product Design & Development traces its roots to the establishment in 1984 of the Cleveland Advanced Manufacturing Program (CAMP). Leading manufacturers in Northeast Ohio created CAMP, a 501c3 nonprofit organization, to assist the region's smaller manufacturers in becoming more competitive. In 2006, CAMP’s board widened the organization’s mission and changed its name to MAGNET: the Manufacturing Advocacy and Growth Network.
| “Many new clients don’t understand there is a proven process to successful new product development. We manage our clients through that entire process.” |
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In early 2000, a team of Cleveland State University researchers published a study predicting that regional manufacturing growth would be driven by the development of new products.*
However, the study predicted success would be driven, not by entrepreneurs and start-up companies, but by existing, successful companies developing and deploying new products in markets they already knew well.
In response, MAGNET’s leadership began evolving the PDD group’s focus towards new product design. The group’s 20 years of hands-on experience with manufacturing productivity gave it an unrivalled track record of success as it entered the product development marketplace.
“We quickly found that it was not enough to offer just engineering services to new product developers,” says Ed Nolan, Vice President. “There is a lot more to product development than engineering and industrial design. So we added the market research, patent research, the up-front business planning, focus groups and other services. Once we could help our clients handle the entire product development process, our business exploded.”
The PDD team’s unique network of expert partners provides its clients unequalled depth of expertise at each phase of the product design and development process. Each project is coordinated by full-time, on-staff account managers who are themselves experienced product development engineers. By tapping its network of relationships built up through 25 years of experience, PDD can quickly build virtual teams that can handle every aspect of a project.
In the past five years, the PDD team has tackled both big and small product development projects for literally hundreds of companies.
*Hill, Edward W. and John F. Brennan, A methodology for identifying the drivers of industrial clusters: The foundation of regional competitive advantage, Economic Development Quarterly 14(1) (February 2000): 65-96.