Your senior engineers are your most valuable asset. The question is whether concept exploration for new business is the best use of their time.
When an engineering organization needs to explore a new product concept — whether for a prospect pitch, a strategic partnership, or an internal roadmap decision — the default is to assign it to internal senior engineers. These are typically the most experienced (and most expensive) people in the organization, with deep domain knowledge that makes them the obvious choice.
The problem is opportunity cost. A senior hardware engineer in Western Europe costs €80–130K in loaded salary. A concept exploration involving architecture definition, component selection, competitive analysis, and preliminary feasibility typically requires 3–5 senior engineers working 4–8 weeks. That's €50–125K in direct cost — and it pulls those engineers off revenue-generating production work.
The indirect costs are harder to measure but often larger. Production timelines slip. Existing clients wait longer for deliverables. Knowledge stays siloed within the team that produced the concept, making it harder to reuse. And if the concept doesn't lead to a deal, the entire investment yields nothing but internal knowledge that may never be applied.
Model T provides a dedicated cross-functional team — business analyst, product manager, and senior engineer — that produces 2–3 architecture-level product concepts in 2–3 weeks, starting from €15K per pursuit. The team draws on Promwad's track record of 500+ completed projects and 100+ in-house engineers across automotive, industrial, medical, and consumer electronics.
The 18-step pipeline is structured and repeatable: lead qualification → company research → market analysis → insight generation → technical review → concept development → business case → mini-offer packaging → client delivery. Each step has defined SLAs (total pipeline: ~50 hours of work, ~10 business days of elapsed time). Every concept passes through a technical expert review before delivery.
Critically, your internal engineers are not involved until a concept is accepted and a real project begins. The entire exploration phase — the riskiest and most speculative part of new business development — is handled externally, preserving your team's focus on production.
In-house concept engineering makes sense when the exploration is tightly coupled to your core product roadmap and requires proprietary knowledge that no external team can access. For new business development, strategic partnerships, and market exploration — where the goal is to test whether an opportunity is worth pursuing — Model T offers a faster, cheaper, and lower-risk alternative. The key insight is not that external teams are better than internal ones. It's that speculative concept work has a high failure rate (most concepts don't convert to projects), and absorbing that failure rate with your most expensive internal resources is an inefficient allocation of engineering talent. Model T externalizes the risk while preserving the option value: if a concept converts, your internal team takes over a well-defined project rather than a vague opportunity.
For concept-level exploration, yes. Promwad's team of 100+ engineers has delivered 500+ projects across automotive, industrial, medical, and consumer electronics. The concepts are not final designs — they are architecture-level explorations designed to validate an opportunity. Your internal team takes over for detailed design if the opportunity converts.
Model T works under standard NDAs and can accommodate information boundaries. The concepts are built from publicly available information about the prospect's products and market, combined with Promwad's engineering expertise. No proprietary client information is required for concept development.
Every concept passes through a senior technical expert review within the Model T pipeline (Step 6 and Step 11 of the 18-step process). You can also add an optional internal review gate before the concept is presented to the prospect.
Promwad has deep specialization in FPGA/SoC design, embedded Linux, safety-critical systems (ISO 26262, IEC 62304, IEC 61508), BMS/power electronics, and Edge AI. For domains outside this range, we'll flag the gap during qualification rather than produce a shallow concept.