DUNCAN TURNER represents Shenzhen in a surprising number of ways: at 36, he’s young for all his success; his life revolves around hardware, but he also knows design, sales and how to get things made; most importantly, he deals in innovation.

    When Turner walks into the sunlit conference room there is a coffee machine on the table. It’s beveled edges and transparent features make it look more at home in an Apple store than a stuffy break room.

    “Did my guys do this?” Turner asks a curly-haired 20-something. Turner’s guys would be one of the many contacts he has built up over the past 10 years designing products, getting them made and helping hardware companies plan their futures.

    The coffee machine — like more than a dozen other products being developed on the 21st floor of an office building in Huaqiangbei, Futian District — is the brain child of a hardware startup looking to make it big.

    Last year Turner became the managing director of HAX, a Shenzhen-based hardware accelerator, which according to a general partner there, is one of the top three most active in the world. To date they have provided funding and mentoring to more than 80 startups.

    At HAX the teams need Huaqiangbei’s resources at their fingertips, but they also need guidance. What material should a product be? What color? What goals should the company have this year? The next five years?

    That’s where Turner comes in.

    “Everyday I’m thrown into three or four companies,” said Turner. “And I have to think about how they are trying to deal with problems.”

    Turner speaks with a slight British accent as he describes a question he faced recently: how do you get people to eat bugs?

    One company Turner counsels is developing a box that grows bugs for people to eat. Bugs are rich in protein, easy to farm, and an eco-friendly food source. But how do you get people to begin growing and eating them?

    “They can package it in a way that’s either completely open, so you can see all these things crawling around inside, or you have a kind of magic box, where nobody ever sees anything… so all you’re doing is putting some food in it, and you get protein out of the bottom.”

    The first people who want to eat homegrown bugs will want to see them, reasons Turner. But that’s a small market.

    “I don’t really want to think about bugs,” he said. “Killing them. Eating them. Anything like that.”

    Hide the bugs, Turner advised the team. “I get to guide the teams instead of doing all the work myself,” said Turner. “I find that really fascinating.”

    Turner earned his position because his experience runs the full gamut of what it takes to get a product onto shelves. Most people specialize in either hardware, sales, design or manufacturing.

    “I’ve had a weird experience because I’ve gone literally from the start to the end,” said Turner. “I’ve done from initial first concept on a piece of paper, to design, funding research, development, manufacturing all the way up to final sales.”

    Projects coming out of HAX this November include a finger-print activated bike lock and a hand mirror that measures skin moisture, with Turner having a hand in the projects coming through the accelerator.

    Turner has 10 years of experience in China — mostly bringing products from napkin sketch to mass manufacture. On Linkedin more than 150 people recommend Turner for his product design and development skills.

    He honed those skills after coming to China in his mid-20s. The Museum of Modern Art in New York features one of the first products Turner manufactured in China, a silicon oven mitt that looks like an orange jelly fish.

    After running his own design and manufacturing company until 2011 — manufacturing in Xiamen and selling in England — he joined the China office of IDEO, the design firm that made Apple’s first computer mouse.

    “With [IDEO] I was helping a lot of product-based companies think about what their strategy would look like for the next five years.”

    Turner says he is “bullish” about the Chinese economy and sees HAX expanding soon. He’s happy helping new hardware ventures get set up in China, providing a service that hadn’t existed when he first arrived.

    “It was a nightmare.” Turner said about setting up his first business in China. “I had a really rough time… I didn’t have anyone to help me.”

    China isn’t always an easy place for a Westerner to do business, particularly when needing good suppliers.

    “I had something quite bad happen to me,” said Turner, describing the day he got a phone call from the United States. “They said to me ‘all of your goods have been stopped on the border because they don’t meet certification.’”

    The U.S. authorities emailed Turner a photo of the inside of one of his products.

    “It looked like a child had just kind of soldered it inside.”

    A factory manager was buying cheap electronic pieces and pocketing the extra money.

    “We went completely bankrupt,” said Turner. He flew back to England, raised money and the company survives today.

    Despite the challenges designing products and manufacturing them can bring, Turner said he loves the work.

    “Seeing something in a consumers hands for the first time that you’ve completely created yourself is the most satisfying thing in the world.”

    (Sky Thomas Gidge)