Here’s a sobering statistic for you: according to Nielsen’s Breakthrough Innovation Project, 85 percent of new consumer products fail.

We’re not going to lie: that’s a challenging number to overcome. However, as experienced product designers, engineers, and innovators ourselves, we at Pivot know that failure of some kind in the new product industry is not just a risk, but a certainty.

No product has ever been designed, prototyped, manufactured, and distributed perfectly from start to finish. We’d even go so far as to say that no product ever will be.

Failure in the product world is a good thing, because it’s the only way we come up with better, more efficient, more reliable designs. To use one of the most tired, yet effective examples of this: what if Alexander Graham Bell had given up after his first, fifth, or even one hundredth failure to create a working telephone?

While we at Pivot embrace the failures that drive us to be better inventors, we also – naturally – take pride in doing whatever we can to make sure those failures are as few and painless as possible. Part of this is staying abreast of the newest trends in product design, and we’representing a few of our favorites here.

Integration of a design team into the larger organization is key.

For companies that are already have a product design team in-house, integration is, and will continue to be, key to success.

As we’ve seen in other industries, working in silos simply isn’t effective anymore. Our world is growing more and more connected, so it makes sense that forward-thinking businesses and industries would mirror that.

This is why we take such a collaborative approach at Pivot. We work extremely closely with our clients to develop the product they need, whether that’s creating something from the ground up or helping a client troubleshoot a particularly difficult design issue. Since we offer prototyping, manufacturing, and business services as well, integration is simply how we do business.

The internet of things will continue to meld physical products with smart and cloud capabilities.

We’ve been hearing about the internet of things for a while now, but it seems that in 2016 we’ll be seeing some real advances. Just like virtual reality and artificial intelligence – both of which are predicted to really take off this year – the internet of things is becoming more and more real. Take, for example, CogniToys, a smart toy in development that uses IBM’s Watson – the artificial intelligence machine that was made famous when it won Jeopardy – to understand and answer a child’s questions, tell jokes, and interact with stories.

Then there’s Disney’s Playmation Marvel Avengers Repulsor, a wearable Iron Man motion sensor that connects to a tablet app and allows the wearer to perform missions along with the Avengers.

There are a whole bunch of these smart toys raising funds on Kickstarter right now, and that number – along with that of other, non-toy members of the internet of things – will only grow.

Big data will drive product development.

Today’s product developers have more access to data than at any time in human history.

This means a couple of things for those of us developing new products. On the one hand, all this data can be extremely helpful. You can measure and research questions like “How many women in X age group in X region visit X website and click on X product over a single week?” Details like this are no longer out of reach.

On the other hand, however, it also means that if you’re looking for to get investment for your product or to license it to a company, you’ve got to back up your claims with data. Anecdotes, hunches, and instinct do still count for something, but if you don’t have the data to get investors to listen to you in the first place, you’ll never get to the point where you can share those gut feelings.

At Pivot, we make it a priority to stay on top of the trends affecting the product development industry. We’d love to work with you to make your product a reality – contact us today!