> "In construction, you hire a general contractor. Why is there no manufacturing equivalent of a general contractor?"
Houses are much more similar to each other than products. If you've built a few houses, you can probably find many more customers who will want similar houses. Most people don't care if their house is essentially the same as somebody's on the other side of town.
But a new product must offer something that's not found in the existing products on the market. If it doesn't, then there's no reason to go to all the effort of getting it manufactured — customers could just buy the existing products where all that investment was made already and is largely recouped.
So an industrial design product is more like the houses you see on the "Grand Designs" TV show. Each of them represents a dream and a vision, and usually there's a lot of trouble and blown budgets on the way to the grand finale where the family finally gets to sit together by the fireplace in their unique creation. ("Grand Designs" doesn't show the dream projects that fail miserably.)
Houses are much more similar to each other than products. If you've built a few houses, you can probably find many more customers who will want similar houses. Most people don't care if their house is essentially the same as somebody's on the other side of town.
But a new product must offer something that's not found in the existing products on the market. If it doesn't, then there's no reason to go to all the effort of getting it manufactured — customers could just buy the existing products where all that investment was made already and is largely recouped.
So an industrial design product is more like the houses you see on the "Grand Designs" TV show. Each of them represents a dream and a vision, and usually there's a lot of trouble and blown budgets on the way to the grand finale where the family finally gets to sit together by the fireplace in their unique creation. ("Grand Designs" doesn't show the dream projects that fail miserably.)