Chief Executive Officer
Konstantin Dolgan, Ph.D., NPDP
Konstantin Dolgan, Ph.D., NPDP is a product development engineer, entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of LA New Product Development Team (LA NPDT), a Louisiana-based product design, engineering, prototyping, and manufacturing company that helps organizations turn technically challenging ideas into market-ready physical products.
The idea for LA NPDT came to Konstantin during a 2013 drive to Houston, while he was a Ph.D. student at Louisiana Tech University: he saw how few teams could carry a concept across engineering, prototyping, and manufacturing without losing it in the handoffs. He had already earned two engineering degrees and spent three years in sales and management, and — inspired by his parents’ entrepreneurial example — he founded a student organization to practice running multidisciplinary projects. After his Ph.D. he worked as an R&D engineer on large centrifugal pumps, found pure engineering without the entrepreneurial side unfulfilling, and in 2015 launched LA NPDT with co-founder Onega Ulanova in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Konstantin holds a Ph.D. in Materials and Infrastructure Systems Engineering from Louisiana Tech University, along with an M.S. in Technological Machines and Equipment and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Karaganda State Technical University. He is a Certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP). His technical background spans mechanical engineering, product design, hydraulics, computational fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, advanced materials, nanotechnology, prototyping, design for manufacturing, and technology commercialization. As an R&D mechanical and hydraulic engineer he designed and analyzed API 610 centrifugal pumps, and at Louisiana Tech he researched materials science, electrochemistry, fracture mechanics, and fatigue crack arrest — his doctoral work focused on electrochemical fatigue crack treatment.
Through LA NPDT, Konstantin has led the development of more than 1,000 physical products and engineering projects across industrial equipment, aerospace, defense, energy, consumer products, and other technology markets. He also co-founded Grapheno, an R&D company developing advanced materials and structural technologies, and QMS2GO, an AI-powered quality management platform for manufacturers. His work combines engineering analysis, hands-on product development, manufacturing strategy, scientific research, and commercialization, with particular emphasis on moving complex technologies from technical feasibility through prototype development and toward scalable production.
Konstantin has been recognized on the Forbes Next 1000 list and named to the Silicon Bayou 100 in multiple years. He is a co-author of product ideation and commercialization materials as well as scientific publications in advanced materials and engineering.
Primary expertise: new product development, mechanical engineering, product design, prototyping, design for manufacturing, advanced materials, R&D, technology commercialization, manufacturing engineering, CFD, FEA, and engineering project management.
Outside of work, Konstantin is a dedicated soccer player, a proud dog owner, and an active volunteer with business-oriented organizations, where he shares his passion for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Selected profiles and sources
- Wikipedia — Konstantin Dolgan — biographical reference
- LinkedIn — Konstantin Dolgan — professional profile
How this role fits the work
LA NPDT runs as one team rather than a chain of vendors. Research, industrial design, mechanical and electronic engineering, prototyping and the manufacturing hand-off all happen inside the same group, so a decision made during concept design is carried by the people who will later have to build the part — and challenged early if it will not survive tooling.
In practice that means every project has a named lead who stays with it from the first call to the final file release. You are not reintroduced to a new team at each stage, and the person who understands why a wall thickness or a component choice was made is still reachable when a factory asks about it six months later.
The team works from Ruston, Louisiana, entirely within the United States. Engineering hours land in the same time zone as most of our clients, prototypes ship domestically, and questions about intellectual property are answered under US law rather than through an offshore intermediary.
Have a product idea to discuss?
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