The Human Pulse of Innovation: Why Tomorrow Lab®’s Approach Continues to Be Relevant When Ideas Are Infinite

In 2014, Tomorrow Lab® was featured on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine as part of its ‘Top Ten Innovators’ list. The company was identified as a studio known for its focus on design and hands-on development in New York’s hardware startup scene. A lot has changed in the world and within Tomorrow Lab^® since those days, but the studio’s soul remains as vibrant and curious as ever. Founders and innovation leaders’ journeys offer unique insights. What endures, what must change, and how values guide a company through industry disruption. The following examines how the company has evolved over time, what’s held steady, and why Tomorrow Lab^® continues to set the pulse for innovation in physical product design.

Tomorrow Lab. Entrepreneur Magazine – Newsstand and Subscriber versions – February 2014

The Evolution: New Tools, New Thinking, New Terrain

A decade ago, hardware prototyping was a slow, grinding process: clunky, expensive, and often constrained by tool availability. These days, electronic prototyping platforms have matured into real “materials” in their own right. Tabletop 3D printers, rapid rendering software, and digital test/analysis tools are now embedded in the studio’s daily operations. These tools haven’t just made things faster but have also elevated the craft, letting product designers tinker, iterate, and push ideas from napkin sketches to functional prototypes at an all-new pace. It has allowed an ecosystem of first sparks, more iterations, and a culture that’s even more comfortable with “the mess” of early invention to thrive.

Designers and engineers at Tomorrow Lab^® now sit much closer to these tools. Where a specialist might once have been needed to run a machine or prep a model, the TL team at large can now be hands-on across many more aspects. Now, experimentation doesn’t need to wait for permission or “perfect” alignment. It often begins with curiosity and a willingness to engage directly in the process.

One of the key moments leading to this shift was the COVID-19 pandemic, which rewrote the rules for collaboration in physical product development. When the pandemic shuttered offices worldwide and markets grew volatile, Tomorrow Lab^® digitized its process and launched a web series, Potentially Genius^®, to share its methods of discovery, ideation, prototyping, and presentation, suggesting that physical product innovation could thrive even in a disjointed world. Tomorrow Lab’s process is now deeply remote-friendly. The team has built new processes, digital rituals, and workspaces that transcend geography, supporting physical product development across distributed and global teams. Whether a mechanism is being refined at a kitchen table in Brooklyn or a CAD file is being tweaked from a mountain cabin upstate, the boundary between physical and digital continues to blur.

Navigating supply chain shocks, international tariffs, and financial swings, the team doubled down on quality, global partnerships, and resourcefulness. As a representation of their Holistic Innovation process, tested across hundreds of products and over a decade of client projects, they have evolved over time, adapting to changing industry demands. The lesson for business builders and product development leaders is that resilience isn’t built in the easy years, but built through the willingness to rethink, retool, and recommit to excellence under pressure.

What Hasn’t Changed: The Foundation Remains Solid

Despite all the change, some fundamentals have stayed the same. China continues to play a central role in global manufacturing. Tomorrow Lab^® continues to work with international partners there to leverage their global supply chain connections and factories to manufacture the products they design & develop in Brooklyn, New York City. And, true to its nature, Tomorrow Lab continues to explore new approaches to bring more manufacturing back to the U.S. The mission remains unchanged. Tomorrow Lab^® is still deeply focused on physical products, still industry-agnostic, and still out to demystify the innovation process for clients and the wider design community. Their clients still span three core groups: venture-backed hardware startups, Fortune 100 innovation groups, and creative advertising agencies developing physical product concepts.

The studio’s roots in New York City remain strong. After a decade in the city’s borough of Manhattan, Tomorrow Lab^® has returned to Brooklyn, in the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center (GMDC), a 360,000-square-foot historic waterfront industrial space, housing over 75 physical craft businesses, like woodworkers, metalworkers, artists, and prototypers. A move that speaks as much to the team’s identity as to practical considerations. GMDC is a few subway stops away from the founding offices of maker industry trailblazers like Kickstarter, Makerbot, and Looking Glass Factory. Brooklyn’s maker energy, its diversity, and its history as a hub for tinkerers and builders all feed into the company’s daily work.

The studio’s output continues to be recognized in global design award competitions and propels the value of its clients’ businesses. Some examples include:

• Adweek recognized the Astronaut Reality Helmet with the top Gravity Award at the 2018 Project Isaac Awards.
• Uber acquired electric bike share startup JUMP in 2018 for a reported $200 million.
• Ro acquired reproductive cells collection and testing startup Dadi in 2022 for a reported $100 million.
• Exponent won the 2023 Dieline Award for Best in Sustainability.
• Richualist appeared on Shark Tank Season 15, and made a double deal with Emma Grede and Mark Cuban in 2024.
• Good Design Awards recognized SymplBrush Jr. and Plus Rides in 2025. SymplBrush Jr. won in the Children’s Products category, and Plus Rides won in the Transportation category.

Tomorrow Lab. Image of Tomorrow Lab^® team members working in a Potentially Genius^® episode

Growth, Challenges, and the Relentless Pulse of Curiosity

Growth at Tomorrow Lab^® hasn’t been about getting bigger, but about getting better and more agile. As the team has grown more multidisciplinary and diverse, they’ve leaned into celebrating early, fragile sparks of ideas, treating failed prototypes as essential teaching moments that fuel future breakthroughs. This is regularly showcased in production with projects like the Symplbrush development, whose development path required reducing 100 different data points, all down to two mouth sizes. Or Saltstone, which required months of tests to grind and suspend salt in an airstream, then package it all in a tiny, aesthetically pleasing device. The thinking is as important as the making, with every project serving as both product and lesson.

Meanwhile, old challenges persist. Fickle global supply chains, the uphill battle of reshoring manufacturing, and fierce competition in the physical product market. While many of these hurdles threaten to stall or derail product launches, Tomorrow Lab^® states that its process is designed to reduce potential negative impacts. The Team faces these realities directly, as seen in their work developing The Mint, a newly patented thermal infuser developed by the team for faster detangling and healthier styling, alongside Dawn Myers, founder of Richualist. The team faced and overcame significant challenges, including high production costs from small manufacturing runs, the need to secure strategic partnerships, and the difficulty of customer acquisition in a niche market.

Tomorrow Lab^® did not just witness these challenges, but they actively encountered and addressed them while developing The Mint for Dawn. But by inviting clients into the process and prioritizing transparency over perfection, Tomorrow Lab^® aims to ensure alignment among stakeholders on the “why” and “how” behind tough decisions. This approach turns market hurdles into opportunities for alignment, learning, and successful product delivery of products that people love to use.

Internal culture remains a pillar. The tools, the habits, and the people are as much a part of the brand as any product that leaves the studio. Intellectual generosity is a standard. Tomorrow Lab^® acts as a source of inspiration and education for the community, not just as a service provider. The studio’s approach is confident, design-led, and deeply human. Always favoring curiosity and precision. Tomorrow Lab continues to expand its audience and engage with it through different platforms, like its Instagram account and its Potentially Genius YouTube series in partnership with DigiKey.

A Reference Point for Innovation

In a crowded field of design agencies and engineering firms, Tomorrow Lab^® hasn’t fallen into the “transactional” trap. It isn’t just about making products that sell, but also inviting a conversation about the craft, the mechanisms, and the moments that lead to real problem-solving in developing new products. The studio has always seen itself as a bridge, from ideas to outcomes, from sketches to manufacturable reality.

In today’s reality, where AI enables abundant ideation and global automation accelerates production, the real bottleneck isn’t invention but judgment and integration. For innovation leaders, this means taste and discipline, with an increasing emphasis on both ideas and execution. The studio’s reputation as the “Human Pulse of Innovation” is more than a tagline. It’s a lived reality, visible in every pin hinge, spring latch, and ideation stage.

Tomorrow Lab^®: Shaping the Future of Hardware Innovation

Looking ahead, Tomorrow Lab^® sits at a critical juncture, where it must leverage the intersection of infinite AI-driven ideation and globally connected rapid manufacturing. Their vision for the next decade is to expand and become a bridge by standardizing new tools like Augmented Reality goggles for real-time prototype reviews, Rendering-to-BOM technology for rapid cost & complexity modeling, AI assistant robots for workplace assembly and testing, and SLAM-enabled live remote presence for watching or participating in product demos.

The journey from idea to impact is messy, challenging, and exhilarating. Knowing this, the challenge for every CEO and R&D leader is finding the true value in curation, integration, and disciplined innovation, where ideas and execution are closely integrated. More than a decade after that feature, Tomorrow Lab® is often referenced in discussions around product development processes shaped by experience, with an emphasis on practical expertise and collaborative design.