House of quality and the modern way of product development including Freedom to Operate Analysis
Freedom to Operate Analysis (FTO analysis and house of quality)
Welcome to a practical guide on smart product development! Today, I want to share something vital that many product developers often miss when starting their innovation journey.
Let me tell you a simple story. A small company in Pune had a great idea for a new EV home charger. They worked hard for two years, spent nearly 2 crore rupees, and created an excellent working model. Their charger was safer and faster than others in the market. Just when they were ready to start selling, they got bad news - another company already owned patents for the safety features they were using. All their hard work and money was now at risk.
This is why I'm writing this series of three articles. I want to help you understand how to avoid such problems by doing something called Freedom to Operate (FTO) analysis early in your product development. Don't worry if this sounds complex - I'll explain everything in simple terms, using real examples that you can relate to.
In this first article, we'll see how understanding what customers want naturally helps us search for existing patents. I'll use the example of an EV home charging system throughout, as it's something many of us are familiar with or might need soon.
By reading this article, you'll learn: How to start product development the right way? Why checking for patents early saves time and money? How to connect customer needs (House of quality) with patent searches?
This knowledge is useful whether you're running a startup, managing product development, or leading a technical team. Even if you're new to product development, these insights will help you make better decisions.
Let's begin by looking at how we first understand what customers really want, and why we must check for patents before spending too much time and money on development...
Let me explain how making a new product development process really works, and why checking for patents early is so important.
When we start making a new product, we first look at what people need and think of ways to solve their problems. Think of it like planning a new house - before building, you need both a good design and permission to build. Similarly, in product development, we move step by step - first thinking of ideas, then designing, making test pieces, and finally launching in the market. But here's the catch - today's products, even simple ones, use many technologies that might be protected by patents. For example, our EV home charger needs technology for safety features, charging control, and mobile app connectivity - each of these might be someone else's patent.
This is where Freedom to Operate (FTO) analysis comes in. It's like checking if the land is free before building a house. Through FTO, we check if our planned product uses someone else's patented technology. Let me share another real story - a company in Bengaluru spent 1.5 crore rupees developing a new medical device. When they were ready to sell, they found that another company already owned patents for the main technology they were using. They had three tough choices - pay high fees to use the patent, change their entire product design, or drop the project completely. The below picture shows modern way of product development:
The best time to do this patent check is right at the start, when we're still planning our product. It's like getting all permissions before starting house construction - much easier and cheaper than making changes later. If we find patent issues early, we can either change our design or arrange to use others' patents properly. But if we find these problems late, it causes big troubles. One company had to stop selling their new product just days before launch because of patent problems, losing crores of rupees.
Starting FTO analysis early helps in many ways. Companies that check patents at the beginning finish their products faster and face fewer legal problems. The cost of checking patents early is much less than facing legal cases or changing products later. Smart companies now treat patent checking as important as market research.
Think of it this way - making a successful product is not just about having a good idea and making it work. We also need to make sure we have permission to use all the technologies in our product. By checking patents from the start, we can develop our products more confidently and avoid big problems later. Let me now tell you how we started our EV home charger project by first understanding what customers really want.
Our marketing team went out and talked to three important groups of people: EV car owners who charge at home, electricians who install these chargers, and power company officials. They spoke with more than 500 EV owners across different cities, 100 electricians who regularly install home chargers, and people from 15 electricity companies. This helped us understand the real problems people face with current home chargers.
Car owners told us they worry about whether charging is safe when they leave their cars plugged in overnight. Many said installing chargers in their homes was too complicated. Electricians mentioned they face problems with different types of home wiring systems, and they really wanted better safety features. Power company officials stressed that chargers should work smoothly with the power grid and not cause overloading problems. To make sense of all this feedback, we used a tool called House of Quality. Based on the customer feedback our marketing team has prepared the house of quality. The house of quality is tool to transfer the customer needs into technical requirements.
Think of it like a detailed report card that helps us convert what customers want into specific technical features we need to build. Through this analysis, we found that safety was the biggest concern - everyone rated it 5 out of 5 in importance. Fast charging and easy installation came next, with ratings of 4 out of 5. People also gave high importance (4 out of 5) to smart features like mobile app control and power grid compatibility. Cost was rated 3 out of 5, showing that people value safety and good features more than low price.
Once we had these clear ratings, our technical team could better understand what to focus on. But here's where it gets interesting - these same customer needs also tell us where to look for existing patents. For example, since safety got the highest rating, we knew we needed to carefully check patents related to charging safety systems.
This brings me to the next important step - how we turned these customer needs into technical features, and how this naturally guided our patent search. Let me explain what happened when our technical team started working on these requirements...
Let me explain how we converted what customers wanted into actual technical features, and how this helped us plan our patent search intelligently.
Our technical team looked at the safety requirements, which got the highest score in customer feedback. They realized that for a charger to be truly safe, it needs several crucial systems working together. First, we need a main safety controller - think of it as the charger's brain that constantly monitors everything. Then we need various sensors that check temperature, detect any electrical problems, and monitor if the charging is working properly. We also need a quick shutdown system that can stop charging immediately if something goes wrong.
When we calculated the technical importance scores using House of Quality, safety systems came out highest with 216 points. This high score came because safety features matched with multiple customer needs - not just safety concerns, but also reliability and ease of use. Power management came second with 180 points, showing how important it is to control charging properly. The communication system, which helps the charger talk to both the car and home power system, scored 168 points.
Here's where things get practical - these scores showed us exactly where to start our patent search. Since safety systems got the highest score, we knew we needed to first check patents about charging safety controllers, emergency shutoff systems, and fault detection methods. We also noticed that safety systems and power management were closely connected - many features needed both to work together. This told us that when searching for patents, we should look for ones that might cover both safety and power control features.
Before jumping into building anything, we wrote down our technical requirements in a special way - like patent claims. For example, one of our main requirements read: "A safety monitoring system for an EV charger that includes a main controller, multiple safety sensors, emergency shutdown capability, and real-time status monitoring." Writing it this way helped us search for existing patents more effectively.
This approach saved us from major problems later. For instance, we found several patents covering different types of safety shutdown systems. Instead of discovering these patents after building our system, we found them early and could design our safety features differently, avoiding any patent conflicts.
Based on this foundation of understanding how House of Quality drives our technical priorities and patent search direction, our next blog will dive into the practical aspects of conducting Freedom to Operate searches. We'll explore how to convert these technical requirements into effective patent search strategies, which patent databases to use, and how to interpret search results meaningfully. Most importantly, you'll learn practical tips on conducting FTO searches even with limited resources, focusing first on the most critical technologies identified through our House of Quality analysis.
Join us in our next article, where we'll show you step by step how we searched for patents related to EV charger safety systems, power management, and communication protocols. We'll share real examples of how different companies managed their patent searches successfully, and what you can learn from their experiences.
