All companies must move with the times and those involved in design are no different. Take Industrial Design Consultancy, based in Datchet in the UK. The company has gradually moved away from its early work in products such as household appliances into higher margin industries such as medical. It is also finding much more of its business from overseas, including China and India, and recently helped Indian pharmaceuticals company, Wockhardt, to design an all-plastic insulin pen.
Many medical devices, from inhalers to insulin pens, are designed with one aim in mind: to dispense a drug to the patient. Wockhardt was keen to replace syringes with two versions of insulin pen: disposable and re-usable; but found a minefield of patented designs in its way. There were about 500 patents covering insulin pens, and we needed to find a way around them all, " says IDC projects director Brian Gough. One option for Wockhardt would have been to license a pen design from another company, but this would have been too expensive: it had to have a pen of its own.