This is ringing very true for us, and a way we've been looking at a few things with our start-up in the last few weeks. For example, we make an EEG headband to

This is ringing very true for us, and a way we've been looking at a few things with our start-up in the last few weeks. For example, we make an EEG headband to improve the efficiency of deep sleep, and this involves the challenging task of capturing brain activity through electrodes that are both comfortable and long-lasting, for consumer use. We have a design which works, but we need to improve on it. Electrode design is a huge area of research at universities, etc. Just the materials required to make an electrode (CNTs, ag/agcl, gold) are costly to work with. We moved from asking "how can we make electrodes" to "how can we quickly and cheaply iterate on electrodes"? This lead us to a new material which we can use in prototyping, and we can then transfer this learning to use the more common materials as we move to production, when it is cost effective to use the material we decide on in the end.