LA NPDT Finalist for the 2020 Louisiana Growth Leader Award

Shreveport, LA, September 17, 2020 – Today, LA New Product Development Team (LA NPDT) was announced and recognized by Louisiana Economic Development Growth Network (LGN) as a Finalist of the inaugural Louisiana Growth Leaders Class of 2020. The product development company was chosen from 58 growth businesses from all across Louisiana. This year, due to the coronavirus situation, the Spotlight Louisiana award event was held online.

LED Growth Network launched in 2017 assists in accelerating the growth of Louisiana second-stage companies. These are the growing companies that have already gone beyond startup and early stages of business.

“Small businesses are the backbone of Louisiana’s economy, and my administration has worked hard to increase support for small businesses, to help them grow and thrive,” says the Governor John Bel Edwards, “Since 2016, we have enhanced, established and relaunched several important programs to benefit our small business community.

The LED Growth Network seeks to nurture local Louisiana companies by continuing to provide resources needed to accelerate growth, import new wealth into our state, and ultimately add new jobs.”

The Growth Leader award signifies that the recognized company and its leaders have made and keep making outstanding and important contributions that positively impact both their local community and the state of Louisiana.

The panel of economic development experts that consists of 17 members evaluates applicant companies on the Growth, Strategy, Innovation, Leadership/Culture, Intangibles and Philanthropy categories.

As a product development company, LA NPDT provides a la cart and end-to-end product development services. By assisting individual inventors and entrepreneurs to develop their products and bring them to market, the team helps to facilitate growth in the small business sector of the local community and the Louisiana state as a whole.

The team also invents and develops its own services and products that are aimed at solving a variety of consumers’ problems and needs in different industries, including healthcare.

For instance, the company developed and donated face shield masks to the health care facilities and first responders in Shreveport, Louisiana in their effort to contribute to the community in the fight with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, LA NPDT used that crisis time to develop Realizr, a free online business management platform that allows companies to manage their business effectively from one place. The platform cuts down expenses that businesses face when using many different fee-based software services. By developing this tool, LA NPDT not only gave hand to businesses in need, but kept their staff employed as well.

One of the many other ways of contributing to the development and growth of the Louisiana entrepreneurial community is LA NPDT’s Tech to Market event that the team hosts annually.

“Tech to Market is designed to help those who choose to contribute to the movement and further expedite the growth of local startup ecosystems,” explains Onega Ulanova, a co-founder of LA NPDT, “A business event like this provides an opportunity for local breakthrough ideas to be seen and brought to the global markets.

The event combines the best of an educational conference, a business trade show, and a networking event to offer startups access to resources essential for success.”

LA NPDT is a product development company based in Shreveport, LA. The team of in-house professionals provides one-stop shop services for new product development & marketing, rapid prototyping, software & hardware development, small batch manufacturing, and more.

The company was recognized by the Entrepreneur 360 as one of the very promising and growing companies in the U.S. in 2019. The team is a member of many business organizations, including BNI, NSBA, and the United Inventors Association.

Awards are a lagging indicator. The 2020 Growth Leader nomination followed several years of the same repeated work: taking inventor and small-manufacturer concepts through engineering, prototyping and production hand-off, and keeping that pipeline moving through a year when supply chains and travel both broke.

Most of the country associates hardware development with the coasts. Louisiana's advantage is different and practical: lower operating cost, real manufacturing capacity in metal fabrication, plastics and marine and energy equipment, and short distances between an engineering team and the shop that will actually cut the parts. When a designer can drive to the vendor, design-for-manufacturing feedback arrives in days rather than in a shipping cycle.

Our team works with inventors and companies across the country from our base in Ruston, Louisiana. If you have a product concept that needs engineering, see our product development process or get in touch.

Choosing a regional development partner is not a sentimental decision — proximity changes how a hardware program runs. Prototype iterations happen in person, factory visits are a drive rather than a flight, and the state's economic development programs can offset a meaningful share of the engineering cost.

Louisiana's industrial base skews toward energy services, marine and offshore equipment, agricultural machinery and chemical processing — which means the regional supply chain is strong in fabrication, machining, welding and heavy assembly, and thinner in high-volume consumer molding.

A realistic program often blends both: engineering and low-volume manufacture nearby, high-volume tooling and assembly wherever the economics land. Knowing which half is local is part of the planning work.

We are based in Ruston, Louisiana and work with clients nationwide. See our development services or get in touch to talk through a program.

Louisiana small manufacturers and inventors have access to a set of state and federal programs that reduce the effective cost of a development program. They are not automatic; each requires an application and a defined project. Budget four to eight weeks of lead time before a program can offset spend, and never build a schedule that assumes an award before it is written.

Recognition is a byproduct of doing the same thing repeatedly: taking a concept, engineering it properly, prototyping it until it works, and handing it to a factory with a documentation package that does not need interpretation. If that is what your product needs, see our product development process or get in touch with the team in Ruston, Louisiana.