CDP – A View by Robert Heller
Robert Heller, founding editor of Management Today, visited Cambridge Design Partnership to uncover the secrets behind the most essential of business practices – new product development.
New products and services are the lifeblood of any business. The difficulties which innovation apparently presents to most management teams must therefore be life-threatening. But the situation isn’t as dire as painted. If it were, an organisation like Cambridge Design Partnership couldn’t exist. CDP does nothing but produce innovative products and processes for its clients – and on its own account. And ‘it’s very rare for CDP to fail’, says Mike Cane, the founding partner.
In fact, out of 40 projects in a year, he can’t recall a failure. That’s because CDP treats setbacks as part of a learning process. Having learnt the lesson, you go back to the project and make a fresh start. You don’t stop until the target has been achieved – matching or exceeding client expectations. The more you do, the more you learn, and 10 years of mounting experience have made CDP ‘very confident’ in the processes which now earn £2 million of revenues – double the previous year’s.
Cane has two partners, very much of like mind. Mike Beadman is an electronic engineer, while Matt Schumann is a mechanical engineer, like Cane. The latter started the business 10 years ago after a widely varied experience. It included a spell with a much-praised UK multi-national: ‘a letdown’, he says bluntly. In contrast, taking himself to the Royal College of Art to study industrial design provided a lasting stimulus. The College thrives on creative imagination: engineering, as taught to Cane in Cambridge, was concerned with analysis and mathematics. Cane’s big idea in starting CDP was to bring the two together, to use creativity in engineering design, but with a leaning towards the artistic side.
