SOCIAL CAUSE MARKETING Surprising Facts About Prototypes: Protracted Innovation

EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE SEPT.2009

SOCIAL CAUSE MARKETING

Surprising Facts About Prototypes: Protracted Innovation

-- Dr Gary Oster

Media depictions of a single, perfect prototype presented with fanfare to clients at the end of the innovation cycle misrepresent the purpose and value of prototypes. Quick, inexpensive, and highly visual prototypes should instead be routinely used to promote a dynamic, ongoing conversation within and outside the corporation to elicit emotional responses, discovering and articulating customer needs, and engendering additional valuable innovation ideas. This article asserts that employees at all levels should routinely be prototyping every potential product, service, idea, or environment. Similarly, corporate leaders need to expand their vision and use of prototypes to gain an insight into much-needed organizational capabilities, future products, services, and ideas and areas of expansion that may enhance corporate viability and profitability.

To survive and thrive in the hyper-competitive global mar- ketplace, corporations need to produce a steady stream of innovation. Failure to consistently innovate almost always leads to a quick trip to the auction block or sudden death for the organization. Key reasons that global leaders innovate include their goals to harness discontinuities; discover and correct faults with current products or services; understand unarticulated needs; take advantage of latent opportunities missed by others; and extend the utilization of an existing successful product, service, idea, or environment.

Innovation is driven by new and fresh ideas. Perhaps the most important tool for finding and developing these new and fresh ideas is the prototype. What is a prototype? Sitting in front of a television, viewers would likely have witnessed a prototype depicted as a single, perfect model shown at the end of the innovation cycle. The presentation to a client is accompanied by great fanfare. Someone lifts a bright red cloth, dozens of cameras flash, and the crowd cheers wildly as what is called a prototype is revealed. Unfortunately, that depiction is not only laughably inaccurate, it completely misrepresents the use of prototypes. A prototype is defined as any primitive experimental facsimile of a proposed product, service, idea, or environment that is used to communicate, develop, and test ideas. Successful prototypes possess six key characteristics: they are visual (two- or three-dimensional); they are inexpensive and developed very rapidly; they are intentionally rough; they are openly shared with others; and they are rapidly revised. This article is about prototypes, and ten facts about prototypes that readers might find surprising.

Surprising Prototype Fact #1

Prototypes are not meant to demonstrate a chosen final idea, but are instead used to generate many potential ideas. They are integral tools in the design process, not a result of it. The fundamental goal of prototyping is to generate as many alternatives as possible. Prototypes are not built to answer questions; instead, they engender the necessary conversation to generate the right type of questions. As a rule, successful innovators do not look for complete answers. Instead, fragments of information uncovered during early prototyping may be recombined and extended into new prototypes to even more closely match the market needs.

The prototyping process is highly visual. Experimentation must become a continuous process through which new and unforeseen ideas bubble to the surface for consideration and are immediately portrayed in two- or three-dimensional form. Translating ideas into visual form is an important first step in turning them into reality. Though often only marginally comparable to the proposed finished product, prototypes allow people to engage in visual thinking. Using prototypes helps participants to intentionally engage imprecise abstract concepts to more effectively imagine, explore, and ultimately choose new ways to meet needs. Prototypes move the abstract to the tangible and allow people to "think out loud." A result of the sharing of prototypes is to develop concepts for participants, who then actively reconfigure the existing prototype or develop completely new prototypes.

One example is the highly productive "innovation factory" of Thomas Edison in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Edison and his staff used simple visual prototypes to encourage changing patterns of thinking. In brief, they raced to translate every new idea into a sketch, no matter how crude. Literally thousands of design sketches for potential new products may be found in the Edison Archives. Drawing allowed Edison employees to share nonverbal concepts visually, manipulating these intellectual building blocks to mentally construct devices that did not yet exist.

Perhaps the most important benefit of prototypes is that they encourage people to temporarily suspend reality to access inspiration and expansive new insights, to `try on' a multitude of possibilities, and to ultimately revise their thinking about a particular subject. `Playing' with prototypes allows a necessary escape from industry or corporate tradition and orthodoxy and opens up new discoveries. Prototypes promote the idea that anything is possible. In this regard, instead of a specification-driven prototype, the result is prototype-driven specifications.

Surprising Prototype Fact #2

The ultimate purpose of prototypes is to encourage an ongoing conversation with customers. Every successful corporation is in love with its customers and knows a great deal about them. Organizations want to move quickly and effectively from intimate customer knowledge to cost-effective solutions to meet customer needs. Every innovative idea starts and ends with a current or prospective customer in mind.

That leads us to an important problem. While organizations want to fulfill customer needs and desires, it's not always easy to determine what those needs and desires are. In many instances, customers may not be aware of their own needs and aspirations, cannot reliably express them, or may deem them irrelevant, insignificant or embarrassing. Traditional forms of market research aren't of much help. Extensive statistical market research reports, in-depth focus groups, and customer surveys have been found to yield less and less useful information. Most market research methods are inherently incomplete because research subjects are generally imprecise communicators, often using verbal shorthand, metaphors, body language, and facial expressions that can provide ambiguous information. In addition, markets and products that do not yet exist are impossible to analyze.

Corporations must look beyond what customers say they want and instead develop what customers show they need, and this is where prototypes come in. Prototypes are utilized to elicit emotional responses and possible ideas from current and prospective customers, suppliers, and competitors. The fundamental value of a prototype is not in the artifact itself, but in its ability to catalyze analysis and interactions. In effect, prototypes answer no questions, but they are essential for the ignition of the conversations that ultimately do. Prototypes incite new questions, indicate possible future directions for research, and test new ways to meet consumer desires.

Customers should not be merely the final recipients of elegant finished prototypes and completed corporate innovation: they must be co-creators and constant critics of a steady stream of prototypes willingly shared by corporations. Successful innovators view customers as eager collaborators in the design process; willing participants in the formulation of specifications for and review of many prototypes; and champions of finished products, services, or ideas to other prospective customers. Much of creative thought is not easily reducible to words; its language is an object or a picture or a visual image in the mind. Through the use of prototypes, successful innovators gain special insight into customer frustration, friction, anomalies, faulty assumptions, and pieces of information that just don't seem to complete any puzzle.

Here's a very simple example: When a chef in a restaurant comes up with a recipe for a new and unusual dessert, he doesn't immediately put it on the menu. First, he makes some of the dessert and gives away samples to customers to learn whether they like it, and what suggestions for improvement they might have. Corporations must similarly provide a steady stream of prototypes to customers to ask what they would change if they could, until they ultimately receive what is called a `hot yes' from customers.

Dr Gary Oster is Director of the Doctor of Strategic Leadership Program and Associate Professor of Innovation & Entrepreneurship in the Regent University School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. He joined the faculty of the School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship in the Summer of 2007 after working for more than two years as Associate Dean for Academics in the Regent University School of Undergraduate Studies and a decade in senior administrative roles at William Tyndale College. He has served as a classroom and online instructor since 1994. Prior to his academic endeavors, Gary was an executive in high-technology corporations, both in the US and abroad, focusing primarily on the computer, electronics, and automotive industries.

Surprising Prototype Fact #3

A `failed' prototype is highly useful to the innovation process. In essence, there is no such thing as a "failed" prototype, as long as you learn something from it. Prototypes rapidly clarify what should and should not be pursued, and numerous `failed' ideas are typically abandoned or reconstituted as customers provide feedback in the process of finding the best alternative. What some might consider to be `failed' prototypes still provide powerful clues to the direction of the next steps in innovation.

As an example, a small East coast Bank had worked unsuccessfully for months to develop a new product for their small business customers. They seemed to get nowhere in developing this product until they decided to employ a prototype. Using his children's colored pencils, a bank officer drew out the proposed product on brown butcher paper and hung it in the bank lobby. As small business customers entered they were given a cup of coffee and a crayon, and asked to alter the drawing of the proposed product. In four days the customers vigorously marked off two-thirds of the product as being unnecessary, and added a number of new features they really desired. The bank initiated the revised product with great success. Was their marked-up prototype a failure? Their improved earnings would say that it was not!

Surprising Prototype Fact #4

Prototypes are very inexpensive to make. You may have seen the very expensive machines that can push out a solid, three-dimensional plastic prototype in a matter of minutes. I'm not sure I would call those a prototype. Perhaps a better word would be a `model'. True prototypes may be constructed using a wide variety of inexpensive media, including sketches on paper, newsprint, cardboard, foamcore, videos, digital pictures, storyboards, bubble-charts, mindmaps, construction paper, duct tape, `exploded' diagrams, computer renderings, clay carving, spread-sheets, process maps, simulations, PowerPoint presentations, rubber bands, Post-It^® notes, virtually any simple visual representation that helps people to better understand where lack of clarity yet exists. Prototypes range in size from an item that can easily be held in your hand to a model the size of a building. Useable rough paper prototypes may be rapidly produced and subsequently modified by employees who possess neither artistic nor ethnographic abilities.

Quick, inexpensive prototypes played an important role in the discovery of DNA, an important building block of life forms. In 1952, molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick ordered precise metal prototypes to be completed by the college machine shop at Cambridge. Not being the patient type, Dr. Watson made crude cardboard cutouts of the four DNA bases, called adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine. Casually playing with the cardboard prototype, Watson continually attempted to fit the model together, with no success. After a brief interruption by a colleague, Watson looked at the cardboard prototype on his desk and suddenly noticed that an adenine-thymine pair lined up on his desk was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair. Immediately he saw how these could be the equal steps of DNA's spiral staircase. Because the sequence of bases on one chain perfectly matched its opposite on the other, when the chains separate, each is the precise template for a new chain of exactly matching sequence. The ideas imparted from the crude cardboard prototype led to the Nobel Prize for Watson and Crick, and a revolution in the biosciences.

Surprising Prototype Fact #5

Quick, ugly prototypes are more useful than elegant prototypes. That's right: as long as they are legible, simple, rough, somewhat messy prototypes are more useful than refined, elegant prototypes. Why? Users—especially non-technical ones—are often more comfortable and honest when viewing a rough or unpolished prototype. By conveying the message that it was developed in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, rough prototypes signal that they were designed with the clear intention of inviting informal suggestions, criticisms, and changes. Rough `approximate' prototypes encourage people to revise their thinking about a particular subject and to `try on' a multitude of possibilities. The `roughness' of prototypes transforms them from a medium that answers questions into one that encourages new questions. Quick, inexpensive, rough prototypes allow designers to continually incorporate ideas from customers and make new prototypes. For example, an industrial electronics firm cobbled together a rough cardboard model of a proposed `future product'. Carrying the hand-held prototype around the floor of an industry trade show, corporate employees showed it to customers and asked for their suggestions. The company received literally hundreds of specific suggestions on functionality and packaging, which ultimately resulted in the development and production of a number of new and highly profitable products.

The term `fidelity' refers to how closely a prototype resembles and functions as the proposed final product, service, process, or idea. To determine the needed degree of prototype fidelity, it is important to know the intended audience and what is expected of the prototype. In essence, prototypes fill one of three functions—prototypes serve to determine the role, the look and feel, or the implementation of a particular product, service, process, or idea. The development of any product, service, process, or idea should occur sequentially as role, look and feel, and implementation. In general terms, prototypes used to determine the role (what it should ultimately accomplish) should be of the lowest fidelity. Low fidelity paper prototypes provide a wealth of opportunities to discover what customers want and, conversely, what they don't want. The minimal investment and extreme malleability of prototypes dominate the early ideation stages because they allow wide exploration of role options and the highest returns on investment of time and staff resources. The use of higher fidelity prototypes to determine role has several significant downsides. In addition to the added cost and an inability to be rapidly altered, higher fidelity prototypes distort the much-needed feedback from employees and customers. High fidelity prototypes are more difficult to construct: they restrict employees to less fully explore the possible design space and often prematurely find their way into the final system. When exploring role, higher fidelity prototypes unintentionally signal that the ideation process is essentially complete and automatically cause customers to focus on the look and feel requirements rather than role. In effect, the premature use of high fidelity prototypes causes valued customer respondents to believe that they have only a vote, rather than a voice, in the design. Higher fidelity prototypes should be used only later in the design process to determine the look and feel, and implementation.

Surprising Prototype Fact #6

Prototypes reduce organizational risk. From where within your organization do the ideas for new products, services, processes, or environments come from now? Most likely, from employees gathered around a conference room table buried deep within the organization. Isn't that a little risky? It is not possible to remove all elements of risk from corporate innovation programs. Fear of risk related to innovation often causes corporations to over-invest in the past and to tilt innovation toward incremental changes in existing products rather than radical new products, services, processes or environments. Risk may be substantially reduced, however, through the regular use of low-cost experimentation via prototypes. When prototypes are actively and consistently shared with customers, user satisfaction is determined at the prototype stage rather than during or after the final development of the product, service, idea, or environment.

With significant effort, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs was convinced to build a full-sized prototype of the proposed Apple Store inside a warehouse near the Apple campus in Cupertino, California. Observations in the full-scale prototype by Apple staff members revealed significant design flaws. After a redesign effort that required an additional nine months, the actual stores opened to great success across the US. Without the use of a prototype, the problems probably would not have been discovered and the Apple Stores may not have been the resounding success that they are today. Successful corporations have learned that, as risky as innovation is, not innovating through the use of prototyping is far riskier.

Surprising Prototype Fact #7

Every product, service, process, and idea should be prototyped. Because everything is and should be open for innovation, everything is likewise open to some form of prototyping. Although most often people think of product prototypes, it is equally important to prototype service offerings, process technologies, and enabling technologies. For example, firms may inexpensively prototype new usages of existing financial, human, and real assets to determine more efficient and profitable utilization scenarios. Proposed changes in facilities, policies and procedures, advertising, product line extensions, reporting relationships, operating instructions, product pricing, distribution channels, etc., all lend themselves to prototyping. Prototyping should be considered in at least ten specific corporate areas, including the business model, networking, enabling process, core process, product performance, product system, service, channel, brand, and customer experience. Organizations may easily remove unnecessary constraints to innovation if they will but first expand their view of what constitutes a prototype.

Surprising Prototype Fact #8

Prototypes help organizations see the future. In corporate terms, `peripheral vision' is the ability to sense, record, interpret, and act on fragmentary, oftentimes ambiguous information that foreshadows possible future changes in technology, channels, and consumer behavior. Astute organizations that are able to tune in to these far-off, fuzzy, intermittent signals gain critical information and competitive advantage faster than those who wait for it to arrive in a neat, orderly bandwidth. The regular use of rough prototypes with employees and customers provides a viable method for rapidly clarifying and prioritizing critical clues about potential future business. Using prototypes helps companies and customers to experience a possible future in tangible ways ahead of competitors.

As an example, one church noted an increasing number of people attending its small group dedicated to recently-divorced people who were having a difficult time coping with the many issues related to divorce and their families. The church then added staff specifically to assist those recovering from divorce. Attendance and membership in the church increased dramatically, due largely to an influx of those who had sought counseling in the church. The church routinely adds and eliminates specialized small group meetings and uses them as prototypes to see where it should focus its attention in the future.

Surprising Prototype Fact #9

Prototypes help build teams and internal focus. Innovation cannot occur unless new combinations of ideas are communicated from one person to another, and prototypes are a tangible method for doing so. Prototyping is not only a valuable tool for developing effective products, services, processes, or environments: it is also helpful for building teams within the organization. Prototypes focus a corporate team around an evolving concept and provide them with a tangible model that clarifies related problems and possible solutions. Prototyping is an essential core competency of the radical innovation team, the lingua franca of the innovation process. Because prototypes are remarkably easy to create, use, and modify, development teams focus on critical issues far earlier in the project and are more flexible and willing to try new ideas. Research has shown that corporate stakeholders who participated in the prototyping process exhibit dramatically higher levels of support for the final design than those who did not, and confidently implement a prototyped design for the intended audience.

At their Marysville, Ohio manufacturing facility, Honda Motor Company decided to initiate a significant redesign of an assembly line to make it more efficient. Rather than hire an army of costly consultants, Honda handed the blueprints of the line to their line employees. Working together in self-initiated teams, the employees sketched in their proposed changes and chalked the changes onto the floor of the assembly line. Heavy equipment cranes were brought in over a weekend to make their proposed changes, and on Monday morning, the considerably more efficient assembly line opened for business. Openness and the routine sharing of information gained from prototyping is the sine qua non of innovative corporations, and require a culture of trust, respect, and curiosity.

Surprising Prototype Fact #10

Prototypes are not just for the R&D team, but for everyone in an organization. The development and effective utilization of prototypes need to be the core competency of the organization and a primary mode of thinking and operating for employees. The future success of global businesses will pivot on their ability to capture and portray new ideas, and the capabilities and rabid tenacity necessary to turn those prototypes into productive reality. With minimal instruction, every employee in every type of organization should be routinely prototyping.

Ford Motor Credit Corporation developed facility plans for a new call center. As a courtesy, corporate planners briefly handed over the blueprints to hourly workers for a cursory review, and were surprised when the employees provided a completely new and significantly different proposed plan in the near term. The plan provided by the employees was accepted and constructed.

Conclusion

Innovation is absolutely essential to organizational survival. Superior, protracted innovation guided by prototyping provides opportunities for companies to grow faster and better than their competitors, and to successfully influence the direction of their industry. Rough prototypes of every product, service, idea, and environment developed by employees are important tools of innovation. Prototypes are useful mechanisms to communicate with customers to find out what they really want and need. The production of many, cheap, unfinished prototypes encourages an explosion of new ideas, and inexact prototypes are useful, as long as they bring organizations closer to the solutions they are looking for. Constant prototyping that ignores industry orthodoxies encourages insight into needed organizational capabilities, plausible future products and services, and even entirely new areas of expansion for the corporation. An accurate measurement of progress in innovation in modern organizations is the speed and extent with which prototypes of concepts and ideas are developed and shared between employees and customers. The future success of global businesses will pivot on their ability to capture and portray new ideas, and the capabilities and rabid tenacity necessary to turn them into reality. If organizations want to survive and thrive in the future, they need to be prototyping today!