Prototyping + Concept Validation

Inventors breaking new ground know how to:

• make embryonic ideas visual and tangible

• rapidly iterate multiple alternatives, explore “crazy” directions

• fail constructively and uncover obstacles early and inexpensively

• stimulate and give direction to the next step of idea development

• provide the context for others to co-develop ideas

This is what Collective Invention means when we talk about prototyping solutions to entrenched social problems. We develop the conditions in which people collaboratively "fail forward", building then stress-testing solutions before introducing them widely into the world. We sometimes describe prototyping as "progressive approximation".

Most of the time, groups do not allocate time and resources for this kind of early-stage exploration and experimentation. Some of our clients (particularly in public-sector, mission-based systems) have invested heavily in generating ideas for systems transformation, but have struggled to realize the value of the resulting concepts. Teams seize on single-point solutions too early in the process and then make pilots to prove that their solutions will work. This is the opposite to the idea of rapid-cycle prototyping, in which they might have had the time and opportunity to throw out some of the earliest ideas in favor of something deeper, more interesting, more specific, more marketable, more usable, or just plain different from their first ideas.

A rule of thumb: at each successive stage of development, the cost of a project—in time, materials, and potential problems—escalates tenfold. By the time you get to pilot, which means introducing the solution into the world of users, you need to have engineered out every error you can possibly anticipate. It is much more cost effective to do multiple, low-fidelity prototypes very early in the process. A pilot product or program should be as close an approximation as possible to the final implementation. In many cases, this actually means releasing the final product into a limited marketplace to learn from a few sophisticated users, with the assump-tion that few (if any) changes will be made before releasing it more widely.

Collective Invention conducts prototyping programs that are rich in learning and yield powerful outcomes. We use straightforward technologies to support crowdsourcing--testing and validation of concepts with a wide and varied audience--and facilitate the process of determining how, when and with whom to move concepts forward to implementation at scale.

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