Joel Liederman, vice-president of Physical Sciences, appeared on CanadaAM April 5, 2016 to talk about how to make a product. The interview is part of CanadaAM’s “What’s Next” segment on technology and entrepreneurship.

He and host Beverly Thomson discussed the process for moving from a napkin to a prototype to a market-ready product, including market testing, prototyping, soliciting more customer feedback, and eventually product launch.

“Marketing a product is a lot easier now than it used to be,” said Liederman. “In the past, if you had a consumer product that you wanted to take to market, you had to book an expensive booth at the Chicago Consumer Products show. Today, the entire process of launching products has been democratized. If you’ve got a product idea and some initial thoughts, you can easily launch an Indiegogo or Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and we’ve got some huge local success stories, including some of the companies that MaRS Innovation has helped to bring to market.”

Whirlscape, OnyxMotion, and WaveCheck are just three of the crowdfunding success stories emerging from MaRS Innovation’s portfolio of companies and licensable technologies.

You can watch the interview on CTV’s website (start at 2:13 mark).