Dual strategy for building hardware
There are several approaches to building hardware depending on whether you are a startup or in a big enterprise firm. While each approach is generally specific to the design and implementation of the platform, in most critical cases there is a dual pronged approach you should consider.
In-house + External team Route
- The idea here is to use some combination of in-house team + external team where the architecture + design work is done inhouse but the manufacturing is outsourced to a third party.
- This model works extremely well for a highly confidential hardware. Its higher in cost but the quality and time to market can be much faster since it requires less amount of paper work.
OEM/ODM Route
- This is a more conventional route to build hardware. The OEM owns the design and implementation based on the preliminary specification.
- There are multi-faceted risk involved all the way from the cost associated with the hardware to time to market.
- A huge advantage here is scale. If you decide to move forward with the product and it requires scaling the hardware from 10s of units to even a million unit, the partner you picked should be able to deliver.
In my opinion, think about taking a dual strategy for a critical product and apply lessons learned in both directions to speed up the project.