The fastest way to derail a strategic innovation project is to pick the wrong outside partner. Not because the work is bad, but because the partner you hired to move you faster ends up moving at the speed of your internal procurement cycle, your legal review, and their own bench availability. By month four, you’re explaining to your CEO why the prototype slipped, and the political capital you spent getting the budget approved is gone.
The good news: most of that risk gets surfaced in the evaluation conversation if you ask the right questions. The five questions below are the ones we’d want any VP of Innovation to ask us before signing anything. They cut through the polished decks and get at what actually determines whether a partner can deliver.
1. “Who, specifically, will be on my project, and what have they personally shipped?”
Sales engineers are not the people who will build your product. Get the names. Get the titles. Get the project list of the actual engineers, industrial designers, and program leads who will be assigned to your work.
You’re looking for two things: domain-relevant shipping experience and continuity. A team that has personally taken a regulated medical device from concept through DV testing and into manufacturing knows where the schedule risk lives. A team that has only done concept sketches doesn’t. Both can sound credible in a first meeting.
Ask for a one-page bio sheet of the proposed team and three to five recent projects each person has worked on. If the partner can’t produce that quickly, you’ve learned something important.
For context: our team currently has 28 engineers and more than 500 combined years of experience, and we’ll tell you up front who’s running point on your project, who’s backing them up, and what they’ve shipped. That transparency isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s how you avoid the bait-and-switch that plagues this industry.
2. “Show me a project that went sideways. What did you do?”
Every product development partner has a deck of greatest hits. The more revealing question is what happens when a project hits a wall, because every meaningful hardware project does.
Listen for specifics. A real answer sounds like, “The injection-molded housing failed the drop test at week 14. We rescoped the wall thickness in three days, ran a second tool, and held the launch window by two weeks.” A weak answer sounds like: “We pivot quickly and communicate clearly with our clients.”
This question matters more for innovation work than for production engineering, because innovation projects are mostly composed of unknowns. You don’t need a partner who claims they never get surprised. You need one who tells you, in concrete terms, how they handled the last surprise.
It’s one of our core values internally, what we call “Stay Real.” We lead with truth, not flattery, and we say the hard things early. That’s also why our discovery process is structured to surface technical risk in weeks one and two, before either side is committed to a path that won’t hold up.
3. “How will you integrate with my internal team, my procurement process, and my IP requirements?”
This is the question that separates partners who have worked with enterprise innovation groups from those who have only worked with founders. The answer should be specific and practical.
You want to hear about: how they handle dual-track IP (their methodologies vs. your inventions), how they work alongside your internal engineering team without creating turf issues, how they accommodate your security and data requirements, how their billing model maps to your procurement categories, and whether they’ve worked under MSAs with companies of your size before.
We’ve worked with companies like the CDC, Delta, Chick-fil-A, Kimberly-Clark, Newell, Cox, USDA, and Google, among others. What that means in practice is that we don’t impose a rigid process. We integrate with how your team already works and act as an extension of your engineering organization, not a standalone vendor. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A partner who insists on running their stage-gate framework over yours will cost you more in internal friction than they save in engineering time.
4. “What does your prototype-to-manufacturing handoff actually look like?”
A surprising number of design firms can produce a beautiful-looking prototype and then leave you holding a bag of CAD files that no contract manufacturer can quote against. That’s not a partnership, that’s a deliverable. The handoff is where partnerships fail.
Ask them to walk you through how they moved from working prototype to manufacturable design on a recent project. Specifically, what DFM analysis did they run, which CMs did they engage, what tolerances did they negotiate, what tooling decisions did they own versus advise on, and what does their post-launch support look like when something fails in production?
The Delta Sky Lounge fingerprint scanner is a useful example from our work. The brief was a more intuitive scanner that fit existing electronics, on a tight timeline. Getting to a working concept was the easy half. The harder half was on-site user research, integration with the existing system, and making the manufacturable version actually deployable across lounges. Both halves matter, and a partner who only owns one of them is creating a hidden seam in your project where things will break.
Our work on the CDC’s portable HIV testing device followed the same arc: scientific intent translated into electronics and mechanical design, then iterated into a deployable device that handles biological samples safely in low-resource environments. That’s not a prototype on a shelf. That’s a thing that has to work in the field.
5. “What will you tell me ‘no’ on, and when?”
This is the question most VPs of Innovation forget to ask, and it’s the one that predicts the partnership best.
A partner who won’t push back on your spec is a partner who will build the wrong thing. You want someone who tells you in week two that the requested form factor won’t survive the thermal envelope, who flags a manufacturing assumption that’s going to triple your unit cost, who recommends cutting a feature that’s going to add four months to the schedule for marginal user value. That’s not friction, that’s value.
The way we frame it internally is “Teach as We Build.” We don’t just deliver, we educate and challenge along the way. The litmus test we hold ourselves to is whether the client understands the why behind the what. If you finish a project with us and you don’t know more about manufacturing your category of product than you did when you started, we didn’t do our job.
By contrast, a partner who agrees with everything and quotes everything is selling you hours, not outcomes.
How to use this list
These five questions are designed to be asked in a single 45-minute conversation. You don’t need a 20-page RFP to find out whether a partner is the right fit for an innovation project. You need to see how they answer when you press on specifics.
If the answers come fast, name names, point to shipped work, and include at least one moment of “here’s what we’d push back on with what you just told us,” you’ve probably found a partner who can actually move your project forward. If the answers stay in marketing language, that’s information too.
We pair deep engineering expertise with leadership so that your team can build with confidence. That’s not a tagline, it’s the operating model we run on every project, whether it’s a startup’s first prototype or a Fortune 100 innovation team’s strategic R&D bet.
If you’re evaluating partners right now, start a conversation with our team. Bring the five questions. We’ll bring specific answers.