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.

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.

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