Joe Born

Background

About Joe Born

I'm helping to bring back the iconic Aiwa brand with a mission to bring people together around music. We do it with a simple formula: great speakers and services that help you find the music the group loves. My career has been focused on bringing over $350MM worth of innovative consumer electronics products to market. In 30 years, I have watched the cost of bringing a product to market go from millions of dollars down to, in many cases, nothing. I have watched product development move to Asia and then begin to come back to our shores. I have watched distribution in our industry consolidate into a handful of electronics retailers and now democratize as crowdfunding sites, eBay, Amazon and other marketplaces eliminate retail gatekeepers. One of my great passions is the combination of startup innovation with the great economies of scale of established supply chains, both in manufacturing as well as design. There remains a great chasm between many modern inventors/designers and getting their products to scale, largely because so much of the infrastructure for scaling remains in Asia. Effective consumer electronics product development today typically must involve the factories that will build those products at scale. Doing this requires a combination of disciplines as well as both left brain and right brain temperaments. The reward is innovative products that are fast to market and cost competitive when they get there. Some have likened the advantage to that of abstracting layers of software, and although the process for abstraction is much different, the benefits of the analogy do hold. See my video on Google's Root Access for more on this subject. Oh and if you're just interested in what I'm up to, we're working on some really cool home audio devices, and will have some exciting announcements shortly. Specialties: Consumer Electronics Product Development