A patent search before building a product is the cheapest engineering decision you will ever make, because it costs a few hundred dollars and a week of calendar time to find out whether the thing you are about to spend six months and six figures building is already owned by someone else. Most non-technical founders […]

If nobody put in writing who owns IP in prototype development before the first line of code was written, the default legal answer is probably not the one you expect: in Canada, the person or company that actually creates a work is its first owner of copyright, and a patent belongs to the named inventor. […]

Most of the risk in hardware product development for first time founders sits in the first ninety days, long before a factory is involved: you either prove the thing works and can be built at a price people will pay, or you spend two years finding out it cannot. The path from idea to shippable […]

The first steps for an invention idea are not drawing it, patenting it, or pitching it. They are writing it down with a date, checking whether someone has already built it, and defining the smallest possible test that would prove the idea works. Those three moves cost almost nothing, take a week or two, and […]

The seven new product development process stages that move a product from a rough idea to a real launch are discovery, validation, concept and scoping, design and prototyping, engineering build, testing and compliance, then launch and iteration. Each stage ends with a decision, not a celebration: you either fund the next stage, change direction, or […]

The whole question of proof of concept vs prototype vs MVP comes down to what each stage is trying to prove: a proof of concept proves the hard technical part is possible, a prototype proves the idea makes sense to the people who will use it, and a minimum viable product proves someone will pay […]

The product feasibility study cost Canada businesses should budget for runs from roughly $8,000 for a focused two week software assessment to $75,000 or more for a deep-tech hardware program that includes bench testing. Most of the studies we scope at Prototype Toronto land between $15,000 and $35,000 and take four to eight weeks. That […]

Most prototype development timeline stages fit inside an 8 to 20 week window for a software product, and 16 to 40 weeks for anything with custom hardware in it. That range is wide because the calendar is set by five distinct stages, not one big build, and each stage has its own failure mode that […]

The realistic smart device concept to prototype cost in 2026 sits between $15,000 and $250,000 CAD, and the spread is that wide because “prototype” means four very different things depending on how far along you need to be. A breadboard proof of concept that proves the idea works costs roughly $15,000 to $40,000. A prototype […]