Prototype: Rentals That Let You Fly the Coop

That vision of affability, along with the animal’s more obvious role in the food chain, are among the reasons that Mr. Tompkins and his wife, Jenn, who describe themselves as homesteaders living in western Pennsylvania, decided earlier this year to start a business called Rent the Chicken. For $350, the couple will deliver to customers a pair of egg-laying hens, a coop, a supply of food and a water dish for a rental period typically lasting from May through November.

Rent the Chicken is one of a handful of backyard-chicken rental businesses that have cropped up in states around the country, including Michigan, Massachusetts and Maryland. They join what is known as the sharing economy, a growing category now estimated at $3.5 billion that includes companies offering products or services without transferring ownership.

Most such businesses fall into two categories. There are so-called peer-to-peer businesses, like Airbnb, RelayRides and SnapGoods, which allow people to rent out their houses, cars or just about any other possession they might not be using for a short time. And there are those like Rent the Chicken and the couture-rental service Rent the Runway that follow a more traditional model in which a business owner buys goods and rents them out.

The enthusiasm for backyard chickens grew partly out of the local food movement. For those who think the best way to ensure high-quality ingredients is to oversee the growing process personally, tending to egg-laying chickens seems a fairly natural extension of cultivating gardens.

As their ranks have swelled, hen tenders have received online advice from sites like BackYard Chickens, a service that helped popularize urban poultry and which has a thriving message board (nearly 900,000 posts on incubating and hatching eggs alone). But even with all this information, many newcomers don’t truly understand what chicken-rearing entails.

“You saw people on Craigslist who had these chickens they were trying to get rid of,” says Leslie Suitor, co-owner of Rent-A-Chicken, a business based in Traverse City, Mich., that has no connection to Rent the Chicken in Pennsylvania. “They didn’t know what they were doing.”

Ms. Suitor, who founded her company in 2009 with her husband, Mark, saw several problems bedeviling chicken owners. One was that they were often accidentally buying rooster chicks, which, of course, did not produce the desired eggs and made a disquieting noise. Some owners also incorrectly assumed that they would start eating organic, farm-fresh eggs for breakfast the morning after they brought home chicks, not realizing it can take several months or more for hens to mature and begin producing them.

Ms. Suitor’s company avoided these problems by delivering only hens in their egg-laying prime. “They get the payback right away,” she says, adding that many customers grow attached to the rental birds and eventually buy them at $20 each.

Renting-to-own is not the most economical approach to raising hens. Building a coop and buying a pair of chicks from a feed store can run as little as $100 to $200 by some estimates — less expensive than a summerlong rental. The point, however, is not to save money, but to test a risky purchase before making a commitment.

As Mr. Tompkins of Rent the Chicken puts it, “We allow someone to chicken out if they don’t want the chickens.”

The chicken-rental companies also provide expertise. “Our customers can read all the books and learn it on their own,” says Douglas Cook, education director of Land’s Sake farm in Weston, Mass., which rents for two-week terms, “but they want somebody like me who can answer all their questions and talk them through the whole thing as a coach.”

The Tompkins operate in the greater Pittsburgh area and the Suitors cover a roughly 100-mile radius from Traverse City, but both routinely receive requests from around the country.

Because hens can’t be shipped very humanely or economically over long distances, the Suitors will begin licensing the Rent-A-Chicken name to farms in other parts of Michigan and in Illinois for a small fee. By next spring, they hope to extend their reach into the Chicago and Detroit areas, among others, via these partnerships. (Not all cities and counties permit chickens, so prospective customers should check local laws before ordering.)

This licensing model is a reasonable approach, says Arun Sundararajan, a professor in the Stern School of Business at New York University who studies the sharing economy. But it’s susceptible to problems.

“They run a higher risk of bad consumer experiences,” he says. This is because the partner farms may have excellent chicken-raising skills, but may lack customer service abilities. “It’s likely to be a new consumption experience for most people,” he says, “so you have to hold their hands.”

Customer service has been a top priority for Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss, founders of Rent the Runway, which also offers a nontraditional service: clothing rentals. The role of their customer service specialists has changed over the last four years from explaining renting logistics to offering fashion advice and pep talks.

“We’ve found this kind of hand-held service is really what a customer needs to build comfort and trust,” Ms. Fleiss says.

She and Ms. Hyman, like others in the sharing economy, see themselves as providing an experience, rather than just a dress or necklace. That’s true of the backyard chicken business as well.

“We’re in this new age where it’s gone from the accumulation of things to the accumulation of experiences,” as Ms. Hyman sees it. “If it’s more efficient to rent a certain portion of your barnyard animals or your clothing or furniture, you’re going to do that. If you don’t need more items to create those experiences for you, you’re probably not going to buy them.”

Prototype: Tech Accessories, Courtesy of the Mountain Pine Beetle

With his father and stepmother, Dave and Nadine Lipson, he owns 37,000 acres that include a cattle ranch, a resort and a 10-mile stretch of the Blackfoot River, other parts of which were featured in the 1992 film “A River Runs Through It.” The infestation had the potential to ruin their business, which banks on the area’s scenic beauty.

“Having a resort in Montana with no trees is a big problem,” Mr. Lipson says. So rather than watch the bugs turn the land into a tinderbox for wildfires, the Lipsons decided to take steps to stop the beetles in their tracks. In the process, they found a way to turn their ravaged wood into something useful: a material for making accessories for Apple products. Their story offers lessons in adapting when an environmental crisis hits and, more broadly, how to be resilient in the face of adversity.

The mountain pine beetles that descended on the Lipsons’ ranch have coexisted with pine trees for millenniums, but as temperatures have risen in recent years, the insect’s range, population and winter survival rate have grown. The beetles now inhabit trees from Southern California all the way up to the Northwest Territories of Canada and as far east as South Dakota.

“From an evolutionary perspective, it’s very similar to a pack of wild dogs attacking an elk,” Andrew M. Liebhold, an entomologist with the United States Forest Service, says of the beetles’ prowess. “When they gang up on the tree in large numbers, they’re able to overcome its resistance.”

The Lipsons’ challenge was to shut down the pack. “We had scouts that hiked through the forest, identifying trees that were infected,” Mr. Lipson says, adding that the needles turn a burnt-red color. The next step was to isolate those trees by thinning around them, then cut them down and haul them out. Within two years, their corner of the infestation was under control.

But now they had thousands of tons of lumber to dispose of. While other landowners burned the wood or sent it to mills to be mulched into sawdust, Mr. Lipson, a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur, was eager to find a better use.

He learned that beetle-kill timber retains its structural integrity if harvested before the natural decay process begins. He reasoned that the wood could be used for flooring, framing and moldings in projects on the ranch, which has more than 50 buildings, so he sent 16 feet of raw timber to a mill for processing. What came back surprised him: a shimmery, blue-tinged wood. The mountain pine beetle, he found out, carries a fungus that produces a natural blue stain. “We thought it was pretty spectacular-looking,” he says.

That further motivated the Lipsons to make something out of the wood. Last June, they started Bad Beetle, which makes accessories for Apple computers, tablets and phones. They also hope that the company will raise awareness about the mountain pine beetle infestation.

The accessories “have the ability to reach people who are interested in eco-minded issues,” Mr. Lipson says. In January, Bad Beetle started offering iPhone backs and iPad stands on its Web site and has sold 730 so far. This summer, it will roll out cases for MacBook computers and iPads. Should Apple, which doesn’t require a licensing agreement for the products, become interested in selling Bad Beetle items in its stores or online, Mr. Lipson says he’s prepared: “We have a stockpile of blue-stain pine that will provide the raw material for Bad Beetle products indefinitely.”

Were his supply to somehow run out, replenishing it would be easy. Some 20 billion cubic feet of such beetle-kill timber is now standing in 12 Western states, by Forest Service estimates. Private land with gently sloping contours and good access to roads provides the easiest and most profitable harvesting and manufacturing opportunities.

Bad Beetle is not the only company using this type of wood. Judson Beaumont, a furniture designer who owns Straight Line Designs, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, creates cabinets, benches and children’s treehouses with beetle-infected two-by-fours. He estimates that in the past three years he has sold about 75 items at $1,000 to $4,000 each.

“It’s probably been my most successful run of furniture pieces,” he says.

John Stein, owner of Kirei, a company based in Solana Beach, Calif., says architects and interior designers have been enthusiastic about the beetle-kill wood panels it began selling six months ago. When they hear the back story, “it resonates,” he says. That’s especially true in the West, where many prospective buyers have firsthand experience with the beetle infestation.

The Forest Service’s Forest Products Laboratory based in Madison, Wis., has worked with insect-killed wood for 50 years, and is now using it as a component in plywood-like panels. The state of Colorado has exempted beetle-kill lumber, sawdust and furniture from sales tax, and estimates that the value of items made from trees felled by the mountain pine beetle and the spruce beetle will hit $22 million this year.

The byproducts of two environmental scourges in Southeast Asia have similarly been transformed into furniture at the hands of Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta, founder and design director of a Miami design firm, Project Import Export.

He obtains dried water hyacinths and liana vines — both considered destructive plants — from his home country, Thailand. He weaves them into chairs, chaise lounges and wall panels for individual and commercial clients, including a Nobu restaurant in Los Angeles. The story behind his creations often “seals the deal” for potential buyers, he says. “Our work doesn’t stop at the point where I tell the customers about the product,” he says. “They tell their friends. It’s a topic of conversation.”

The effort involved in transforming these raw materials typically results in higher prices. Bad Beetle’s iPhone backs, for instance, cost $69, whereas silicone ones by the fashion designer Marc Jacobs sell for up to $48 and resin hard cases by Kate Spade are $40.

GIVEN the industry’s youth, it’s not yet known how many consumers will pay a premium for such products, but according to Thomas Lyon, a professor at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, the beetle-kill wood could be a tough sell.

Since it would otherwise go to waste, the timber that’s used can be considered sustainable. But the response to sustainably produced wood has been underwhelming so far, Professor Lyon says, adding that people tend to open their wallets enthusiastically only for items that affect their health or are showpieces. With wood products, those criteria rarely exist. “Typically they’re hiding behind your walls,” he says. “Nobody can see that you bought sustainable wood.”

Buyers, however, could consider high-end furniture or hand-held tech accessories as a kind of wooden bling that’s worthy of their dollars.

If businesses can “transform the color into a positive so that it becomes something cool, then it may sell for a premium,” Professor Lyon says. “But it won’t be because it was sustainable, is my guess.”

Prototype: At Ministry of Supply, Teamwork in Making High-Tech Apparel

Six years later, while riding his bike around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an engineering student, he realized he needed a dress shirt that could withstand the rigors of bicycle commuting. This time, he teamed up with a classmate and set out to make that missing item in the clothing market.

But they weren’t the only ones at M.I.T. to identify such a problem. Two students at its Sloan School of Management soon got together to develop their own version of work-appropriate clothing made with practical fabrics.

One was Kit Hickey, a former investment banker who had been frustrated that her Brooks Brothers suits were so stiff compared with her rock-climbing togs. The other was Aman Advani, now 28, who in his previous life as a management consultant had begun cutting the tubes from his dress socks and stitching them to the feet of his sports socks to build better footwear for his rigorous travel schedule.

The two groups, potential competitors, met each other at M.I.T.’s entrepreneur center in 2011. But instead of seeing each other as rivals, they decided to work together. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy.’ I can’t believe we found each other,” Ms. Hickey, 28, says of the meeting.

“It was promising to know that there might actually be a market for this,” adds Mr. Amarasiriwardena, 24. By this time, he and his classmate Kevin Rustagi had started Ministry of Supply, a clothing business based in Boston that specializes in high-tech office apparel. Soon after the meeting, Ms. Hickey and Mr. Advani joined the company.

Business partners often cross paths in the early, brainstorming stages of a project. But it’s unusual for alliances to form further down the line, after each side is emotionally invested in its idea, according to Joseph B. Lassiter, a professor at the Harvard Business School and faculty chairman of the Harvard Innovation Lab.

“Everybody wants to have a baby, but your baby is different than the other guy’s baby and you’re in love with it,” Professor Lassiter says. “You think the other guy’s baby isn’t as cute as yours.”

A similar apparel company, called Outlier and based in Brooklyn, was also formed by people who might have become competitors. Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens, its founders, were two bicycle commuters who met at their local coffee shop after one had already been stitching prototypes of cycling-friendly dress shirts and the other was making durable dress pants.

“Turns out we had been working with the same fabrics and looking at very similar problems,” Mr. Burmeister wrote in an e-mail.

With complementary products, the two saw that their babies would make excellent siblings. “Within a couple months of that meeting we teamed up to launch Outlier,” Mr. Burmeister added.

In Ministry of Supply’s case, the concepts of the two potential competitors were nearly identical. True to their M.I.T. backgrounds, the founders are focusing on technological innovation.

Mr. Amarasiriwardena and his team have relied on an engineering process used in aerospace design to help understand how the body’s skin moves, so that their garments will stretch in a similar way. They use thermal imaging to find the spots in the body that generate the most heat, so they can determine where to place vents in the shirts.

Some of the fabric was created with a material that NASA had designed to regulate astronauts’ body temperatures in 200-degree heat changes. Ministry of Supply has a license to use the technology for the material. While the primary task of most athletic apparel is to manage sweat, this fabric keeps the body cool, preventing perspiration from occurring in the first place.

To execute some of the designs, they use computerized knitting. “It lets us dictate if we want a lighter mesh in the underarm in the back, but we want more coverage in the front,” Mr. Amarasiriwardena explains.

But for a high-tech apparel product to achieve mass appeal, it must also be aesthetically pleasing. “If it doesn’t look good, it’s over,” says Mark Satkiewicz, president of SmartWool, a company that sells high-performance merino wool socks and clothing.

The key is finding a balance between looks and performance, which is no simple feat, Mr. Satkiewicz says. “It’s very difficult,” he says. “I don’t think any brands have hit a home run every time.”

To address this issue, Ministry of Supply tapped its customers from its beta stage for feedback before it opened to the public last June. A New York fashion designer then incorporated the suggestions into new designs. “We did more than 20 iterations of the dress shirt and we were progressively able to improve the aesthetic,” Ms. Hickey says, and as a result, the clothing now has a far more tailored appearance. Since last June, the company has sold 12,800 shirts and pants through its Web site and its Boston showroom (Mr. Rustagi left the company last year.)

One of the early adopters was Craig Breslow, 32, a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox whose fiancée bought him a shirt as a birthday present. She thought it would “appeal to the nerd” in him, he recalls, while he was “just hoping the fashion side of things would be passable.” Mr. Breslow is a Yale graduate with a bachelor’s degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

Mr. Breslow decided to take the shirt on the road during the baseball season, testing it in the disparate climates of places like Texas and Toronto. It came in handy after games, when he and his teammates “have about 30 minutes to eat, shower, stop sweating and put on a suit,” he says. He liked the shirt — and its look — so much that he bought two more shirts, as well as a pair of slacks, whose comfort he compared to that of sweat pants. Then he decided to invest $50,000 in the company.

“It’s like the scientific method,” Mr. Breslow says of Ministry of Supply’s approach. “Find a problem, develop a hypothesis, test it and reach a conclusion. That’s something I can appreciate.”

Prototype: Milk & Honey, an Online Shoe Company Started by Sisters

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Prototype: Elephant Trunk Mailbox Evolves to Fit a New Purpose

“The name Elephant Trunk came about just because the Elephant Trunk can hold a lot,” Ms. Troyer, 48, said recently, sitting in a conference room at Architectural Mailboxes, the company that she and her husband, Chris Farentinos, 45, run in Redondo Beach, Calif. “It was as big as a baby elephant” — and not just its nose.

That, it turned out, was a problem. Back in 1999, when she and Mr. Farentinos dreamed up the Elephant Trunk, it was designed to be large enough to hold the television-size computers that people were ordering as e-commerce began to take off. But while it was still in prototype, flat-screen computer monitors came along, defeating its purpose.

“It was deflating,” Ms. Troyer said. “All this time and money and energy had been wasted.”

If Ms. Troyer did not sound all that deflated, it’s because the Elephant Trunk is back — in a slightly modified form. Now more the size of a baby panda, it is being introduced in 157 Home Depot stores around the country in a three-month test run. Mr. Farentinos, a former designer of baseball bats, says he wants it to become a “lifestyle product” that no household can do without. Just as everyone has a mailbox for snail mail, he hopes that everyone will soon have an Elephant Trunk for home-delivered packages.

The couple were featured in this column in 2010 for the Oasis, a lockable mailbox for regular mail that they started selling when the Elephant Trunk fell through. Their story shed light on how an idea can be as dependent on timing and adaptability as anything else.

Even after shoving the Elephant Trunk into the proverbial drawer, the couple were convinced that it would eventually see the light of day; it was just a matter of when. Sure, computers had become skinnier, but more and more people were shopping online for a wide range of products, and they often were not home to accept the packages.

Beyond the annoyance of coming home and finding those packages “behind a planter,” Ms. Troyer said, or wet from the rain, there was the danger of parcel theft.

Still, when they floated the idea of a mailbox for packages, the response from retailers was, “I think it’s too soon for that,” Ms. Troyer said.

“They’d say: ‘I don’t get it. It’s too big,’ ” Mr. Farentinos said. The couple, who have been married for 23 years and business partners for 11, often finish each other’s sentences.

BUT as the years went by, and online retailing became ever more pervasive — 167 million United States consumers now shop online, according to a report by Forrester Research — the idea of a safe place to store deliveries seemed more of a no-brainer. Amazon.com is experimenting with a service that lets shoppers have their purchases sent to metal lockers, much like post-office boxes, that are set up in convenience and other stores.

Last year, good timing was compounded by luck when Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos met with Theresa Graham, a merchant for the builders hardware category at Home Depot. As they chatted, Ms. Graham explained that she was a working mother who often came home to boxes strewed all over the porch. She said to Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos, “You know, what I’d really like to see is not a mailbox, but a parcel drop,” Ms. Troyer recalled.

“Chris and I looked at each other and our eyes lit up. It was like, O.K., it’s time.”

Yet even with a green light, the Elephant Trunk needed some tweaking. For one thing, it was much too big, measuring 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet.

But what was the proper size? “The constraint was how willing people are to put something like this on their front porch,” Mr. Farentinos said. “We wanted to make it big enough to accommodate almost anything, but we also wanted to make it, at least out of the chute, something that would not be so obtrusive that they would be resistant to using it, and also not cost-prohibitive.”

After researching what types of items people most often buy online — the answer was clothing — the couple began experimenting with different dimensions, settling on a model that is narrower and less deep than the original “E.T.,” as Ms. Troyer affectionately called the Elephant Trunk. They also modified the original design so that now it can accept multiple deliveries.

Another hurdle was persuading a major parcel carrier to deliver to the Elephant Trunk. Ms. Troyer spent months trying to contact executives at United Parcel Service via LinkedIn.

“I’d search, search, search, find their e-mail and send them our presentation,” she said. “I’m an online stalker! That’s what I’ve turned into.”

In the end, no stalking was necessary. Through Ms. Graham, a meeting was set up with U.P.S., which agreed to deliver packages to the Elephant Trunk if residents provided instructions to do so.

The product “satisfies a growing need to provide a secure drop location of parcel deliveries,” Ms. Graham said. “No one wants their purchases left out in plain sight.”

Ms. Troyer and Mr. Farentinos are already envisioning different types of Elephant Trunks for the future — say, for apartment dwellers, or for people who might actually want a bigger mailbox.

“We call her Mama E.T. She’s going to have babies,” Ms. Troyer said, smiling as she patted an Elephant Trunk next to her on the floor. “There’s going to be more.”

Prototype: Using Aluminum to Lighten Manufacturers’ Load

But innovations in their design and manufacture may play an important role in creating a fleet of more environmentally sustainable cars and trucks.

Taylor Hopkins, 24, was part of a five-student research team at Ohio State University that recently created three novel designs for shipping pallets. Ordinary pallets are made of wood; the students’ prototypes are made of aluminum, which lasts longer.

The aluminum pallets are also much lighter than wood pallets, which saves fuel during shipping.

“We were presented with the problem of, try and come up with a new pallet that we thought could make an impact environmentally,” Mr. Hopkins said. “We ended up going with aluminum just because it’s very widely used and it’s lightweight.”

Aluminum is also significantly more expensive than wood, which means that the students’ designs are unlikely to become the industry norm soon. But the technology behind them could be useful to carmakers, which have started to embrace aluminum as a means of building lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

“This project is such an interesting microcosm of the challenges that the transportation industry in total is facing, in moving from heavy steel to lightweight aluminum,” said Randall Scheps, automotive marketing director of Alcoa, and chairman of the aluminum transportation group at the Aluminum Association. Mr. Scheps said the student team looked at various methods of joining, or bonding, metals. It also looked at forming, or bending, metals, and at recycling. “These are all issues that the auto industry is facing,” he said.

Companies and foundations have been looking to young innovators for environmentally sustainable and cost-effective solutions to real-world problems. In the case of the shipping pallets, the project was funded with a grant from the Alcoa Foundation, which wants future engineers to think about use of lightweight materials. (Although the use of aluminum clearly benefits Alcoa, an aluminum company, it did not have to be used in the project.)

It’s an issue that has taken on urgency in Detroit in anticipation of Obama administration fuel-economy regulations that will require American vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Ford, for instance, that producer of macho, all-terrain trucks, is working on an aluminum version of its popular F-150 pickup.

Dr. Glenn Daehn, a professor of materials science and engineering at Ohio State and the students’ research adviser, says the aluminum shipping pallets are an example of “using simple projects to inject ideas into how we might make lighter-weight door systems or seats” — research that Ohio State is working on with companies like Honda and General Motors.

Mr. Hopkins said welding is an issue in dealing with aluminum. “There’s just a certain property of aluminum that if you heat it up too much, or for too long, it loses a lot of its strength,” he said.

To get around that, the students relied on “conformal interference joining technology,” a method of joining metals through a process involving electromagnetism, as opposed to heat.

Then there was the question of how to make the pallets cost-effective. Aluminum pallets on the market can cost more than $200 each, in part because they are welded by hand. Aluminum pallets are used to ship materials that must be kept sterile, or that will be stored for long periods.

But the students’ models are all estimated to cost less than $75 each. That was achieved by making the designs simple enough so they could be mass-produced.

“They weren’t some crazy designs that would take 20 hours to produce, where you’d have to do it one at a time,” Mr. Hopkins said. “Our designs can be automated. They only have two, separate pieces in a couple of them.” That makes it possible to “knock them out in a short amount of time,” he said.

WHILE the project could eventually affect how cars are manufactured, it may not change the world’s shipping pallets. According to Edgar Deomano, technical director of the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association, wood pallets, which account for 90 percent of the domestic market, are not going away, mainly because of cost.

“A recycled, or repaired, wood pallet could go for as low as $3 each,” Mr. Deomano said.

As for the argument that wooden shipping pallets are responsible for deforestation, he said: “That’s a false impression. Our industry is able to recycle pallets again and again. You don’t have to cut down more trees, you just have to repair existing pallets.”

Dr. Daehn says he remains hopeful, however, that a company will “step forward and commercialize” the new aluminum shipping pallets.

“We need more than a student project to do that, but I think we’ve shown them the promise is there.”

In the meantime, the project has already served Mr. Hopkins well. After graduating from Ohio State in June, he was hired as a metallurgist at Valbruna Slater Stainless in Fort Wayne, Ind.

“It was definitely one of my résumé highlights,” he said.

Prototype: In a Fisher-Price Lab, Apps Are Child’s Play - Prototype

It’s well known that children are quick to learn new technology. But 6-month-olds? How did the idea arise for a toy that allows its user to gnaw on its brightly colored handles and drool on its protective screen, while also manipulating apps for counting and singing?

At Fisher-Price, such products result from a process known as spelunking, which in its literal sense means to explore caves. But in the realm of toy making, it refers to the simple act of watching children play.

A similar process is alive and well at other companies, like LeapFrog, maker of the LeapPad, a touchscreen tablet for children as young as 3; and at Hasbro and Crayola, which have partnered with digital media companies to create apps for very young children.

At Fisher-Price, “we bring babies in with their moms and watch them at play with different types of apps, different types of products,” said Deborah Weber, senior manager of infant research. Her job, she said, is to “understand the ages and stages of babies — what they can and can’t do, what their interests are, and the growing needs of families today.”

Spelunking has been around since the Fisher-Price PlayLab was formed in 1961, the same year that bricks made by a Danish company called Lego made their American debut. In its earlier days, the lab was filled with toys like a googly-eyed rotary phone known as the Chatter Phone, and the Corn Popper, a kind of mini-lottery machine on wheels.

Today, the lab, located at the Fisher-Price headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., looks more like an Apple store. But instead of adults and teenagers, there are infants staring into computer screens, and parents and toddlers are passing iPads back and forth.

The setting is similar at LeapFrog’s Kid Lab in Emeryville, Calif., where digital devices and apps are tested by children who both have and haven’t had regular exposure to computers.

“Two years ago, it was harder to find kids who had used an iPhone or an iPad at home,” said Alissa McLean, a senior researcher in LeapFrog’s user experience group, which examines how children interact with online content and computers. “Now it’s not hard at all.”

“We used to talk about kids being the first generation of digital natives,” said Jason Root, chief content officer at the Ruckus Media Group, which has partnered with companies like Hasbro to create storybook apps. “Now we have a generation of newborns who are going to be weaned on touch devices.” 

At Fisher-Price, Ms. Weber said, “We see 6-month-olds batting at the screen, 9-month-olds swiping, and 12-month-olds pointing out objects to see.” Observations like these are passed along to toy producers and industrial designers, resulting in products like the iPad case and the Laugh & Learn Apptivity Monkey, which comes out in August.

The Apptivity Monkey would pass for just another stuffed animal if it didn’t have a thick, plastic iPhone case attached to its belly; the front of the case is made of see-through plastic. An iPhone can be placed inside, and a child can play apps on it, either by pressing on the iPhone directly or on the monkey’s paws, which interact with an array of alphabet and singing apps.

The monkey is big enough and soft enough so that the iPhone can sustain even major tumbles, Fisher-Price asserts. But the iPhone is not included. So doesn’t that make for a pretty expensive toy?

Maybe not. When Kathleen Kremer, another spelunker who is the company’s senior manager of user experience, was observing how preschool-aged children played with their parents’ iPhones and iPods, she stumbled on the “pass-back factor.”

“People are now on their second-generation iPad or second iPhone, so what they typically do with the old one is give it to their child, so the kids actually have ownership of these devices,” she said. She has also studied diaries and scrapbooks that parents were asked to keep, documenting their children’s behavior.

Because of the pass-back factor, the new Kid Tough Apptivity Case — similar to the Laugh & Learn product, but designed for older children — is made to fit all generations of the gadgets, Ms. Kremer said.  

Innovations like this are fueling the digital toy trend, according to Lisa Harnisch, senior vice president and general merchandising manager at Toys “R” Us. Last year, she said, the trend in children’s apps and app-related products “really started to heighten and explode.” Indeed, in the last year, there have been nearly three million downloads of Fisher-Price’s Laugh & Learn apps. By year-end, LeapFrog expects to have 325 apps at its online App Center, double the number at the end of 2011.

Not everyone sees this as a justification to ply infants with computers. “Infants learn best from real people and playing with real toys,” said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the author of “Baby 411.” “They learn how to communicate, how to engage with others and how to problem-solve using their five senses. While technology can offer a virtual way to learn some of these skills, they will never replace the value of interacting with humans or being able to manipulate and play with toys in one’s hands.”

In any case, it might be too late to stop an 18-month-old from discovering the joys of Netflix — selecting a movie or TV show to watch, or rewinding and replaying a favorite scene — something that Ms. Kremer has come across in her field research.

“It was pretty remarkable that she could master all those different steps,” she said of the tech-savvy toddler. “The motivation was there.”