Product Development Corporation history

Their idea originated in 1958 after Feldman and Pollak heard about a new resin plasticizer developed and put on hold by a company unsure about the product's marketability.

In 1959, three New York City lawyers, Jerome Feldman, Martin M. Pollak, and Jess Larson, began NPD as a scouting service for dormant patents.

National Patent began gaining momentum in 1961, a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, after Feldman and Pollak wrote a letter to then-Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev asking for rights to Soviet inventions.

Alford, B.W.E. W.D. & H.O. Wills and the Development of the UK Tobacco Industry 1786–1965.

Then in 1966 NPD concluded a licensing agreement with Bausch & Lomb of Rochester, New York, a major player in the optical business and well aware of the potential market for soft lenses.

In 1987, NPD sold its interest in both International Hydron and Abbey Medical, Inc., a renter and seller of durable medical equipment.

In 1989, the Medical Group introduced a new quick-opening adhesive bandage, STAT STRIP, to the hospital and medical markets.

ADC was formed from NPD Trading (USA), Inc., which had been set up in 1990 to provide consulting services to Western businesses in Russia and Eastern Europe.

PDG had been founded in 1992 by former Hewlett-Packard engineers seeking to bring world-class product development practices to technology companies.

NPD organized its American Drug Company (ADC) subsidiary in 1993 to distribute general pharmaceuticals and medical products in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the former Soviet republic.

As a group, sales of these biopharmaceuticals approached $2 billion in 1994.

As of March 1, 1995, NPD decreased its holdings of Duratek's outstanding shares of common stock from 61 to 40 percent.

In 2001 though, seventeen software engineers got together in a ski resort and wrote the Agile Manifesto, building on work spanning back to the seventies on light weight alternatives to the heavy-handed and process-oriented waterfall method of developing software.

Bower, Edward K. Specification-Driven Product Development. iUniverse, 2003.

"Making NPD Work." Nilewide Marketing Review, 10 October 2004.

Simplexity Product Development was founded in San Diego, California in 2005 by Steve Mott and Minh Duong after a predecessor company, Product Design Group (PDG), was purchased by Flextronics and later consolidated.

Simplexity opened a second office in the Portland Oregon area (Vancouver, Washington) in 2006, upon the request of a key client to have Simplexity engineers to support their projects locally.

Shankland, Stephen. “AMD Nurtures Open-Source Graphics.” CNET, 6 September 2007.

Microsoft pursued a similar strategy throughout the 2000s, acquiring software companies for technologies that could be incorporated into existing and developing Microsoft products. For example, in 2008 Apple acquired P.A. Semi, a small chip manufacturer that could supply exclusive new chips for Apple's line of iPods and iPhones.

After serving as the director of the Portland/Vancouver office, Dorota Shortell took over running the company from Steve Mott in 2010 and continues to serve as Simplexity CEO.

In 2016, after continuous growth, Simplexity expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area, opening a design center to serve Silicon Valley’s hardware ecosystem, from startups to established companies.

He is also the author of the best-seller Product Leadership, How Top Product Leaders Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams (O'Reilly, 2017).