Prototyping - Publications - Faculty & Research

17 Feb 2020
Sharpening Your Skills

How Entrepreneurs Can Find the Right Problem to Solve

false results. Focus groups can be useful later in the product cycle when you want to get reactions to branding or observe groups of people using your product if it’s a tangible item. Prototype testing The best way to validate that a... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

04 Apr 2023
What Do You Think?

How Does Remote Work Affect Innovation?

out an email. He and four colleagues . had seen Larry’s note on the wall . (Dean’s email) included a detailed analysis of why the problem was occurring, described a solution, included a link to a prototype 9 implementation of the solution... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

12 Aug 2019
Research & Ideas

How Scale Changes a Manager's Responsibilities

way or if it's time to part ways–the company has outgrown them. I once had a talented engineer on my team who was a great prototyper but not strong writing production-level code. Each time he tried to follow a project from the... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

12 Dec 2011
HBS Case

HBS Cases: Clocky, the Runaway Alarm Clock

initial media interest in the product—and for the reactions it engendered among journalists. Following a demonstration of a prototype on Good Morning America, for example, Diane Sawyer said, "I would kill Clocky in about two... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Consumer Products

04 Dec 2019
Book

Creating the Experimentation Organization

simulation and rapid prototyping to optimize product development and R&D. “After that, I thought I was done,” he says. Since then, however, there has been a rise in new technology platforms that allows experimentation to innovate on... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

28 Jan 2020
Book

Advanced Leadership Requires More Than Outside-The-Box Thinking

practical as well as visionary—to know how to pin down a big dream into actionable first steps. But advanced leaders don’t confuse the details of their prototype or pilot project with achieving the goal. They continue to be... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne

25 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why IT Does Matter

the information age. The jobs of the CTO and CIO are and will be of unparalleled importance in the decades ahead. Max Hopper of American Airlines and Paul Strassmann of Kraft and NASA are not the last of a dying breed of dinosaurs, but View Details

Keywords: by F. Warren McFarlan & Richard L. Nolan

21 Oct 2015
Research & Ideas

How to Predict if a New Business Idea is Any Good

works, where there are usually a small number of partners in a group that all specialize in one industry.” It may be more important for entrepreneurs to quickly develop a prototype for a minimum viable product and get early feedback from... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Accommodations; Financial Services

21 Aug 2000
Research & Ideas

From Emerging Economies to the Global Market: The Case of Embraer

trapped in the government's embrace. As Ghemawat told the group, "In some sense the Embraer strategy is not very unusual. It's almost a prototypical strategy from one of these environments trying to become internationally... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Manufacturing

26 Nov 2001
Research & Ideas

How Toyota Turns Workers Into Problem Solvers

in prototype forms before being released. Why? Because designers know that no matter how good their initial efforts, they will miss the mark on the first try. There will be something about the design of the overall system structure or... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Johnston; Manufacturing; Transportation; Auto

18 Apr 2000
Research & Ideas

Learning in Action

their way up the mountain. After the two days testing, and constant interactive feedback, the design team returned to headquarters and immediately debriefed and extracted key learnings. Prototypes were quickly developed and sent to... View Details

Keywords: by David A. Garvin

23 May 2012
Research & Ideas

Five Ways to Make Your Company More Innovative

work toward Jobs's "beautiful, elegant solution." This requires companies to be astute about how they prototype and test. IDEO adheres to the "three Rs" rule: rough, rapid, and right. For example, when testing the... View Details

Keywords: by Garry Emmons, Julia Hanna & Roger Thompson

10 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Retailing Revolution: Category Killers on the Brink

declined or held flat, and return on invested capital (ROIC) has suffered dramatically. This decline in ROIC has been exacerbated by the significant growth in store square footage before the recession. Retail store count exploded through the mid-2000s, and the size of... View Details

Keywords: by Rajiv Lal & Jose B. Alvarez; Retail

05 Sep 2019
Sharpening Your Skills

Making the Right Technical Hire

first prototype and then let that language dictate future work as their product gets market fit and scales. This rarely works out, unless that first engineer is a ringer, and most of the time the reality of having to refactor your entire... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin; Technology

06 May 2002
Research & Ideas

A Toolkit for Customer Innovation

ranging from minor modifications to major new innovations. The user-friendly tools, often integrated into a package we call a "tool kit for customer innovation," deploy new technologies like computer simulation and rapid View Details

Keywords: by Stefan Thomke & Eric Von Hippel

03 Dec 2015
Op-Ed

How "New Nuclear" Power Could Save the Planet—If Regulators Would Allow It

reactor, in the US. Bill Gates is its chairman. Earlier this year, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the China National Nuclear Corporation targeting the first working prototype in China. ThorCon Power has designed a... View Details

Keywords: by Joseph Lassiter; Energy

22 Dec 2016
Op-Ed

The Small Business Administration is a Model for How to Drive Economic Growth

eliminating SBA programs. Rather, it was an ambitious plan to make it easier for constituencies, like small businesses, to access the programs and services that are in place to help them. “The SBA is perhaps the perfect prototype for a... View Details

Keywords: by Karen Mills

11 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Cheap, Fast, and In Control: How Tech Aids Innovation

of well-designed business experiments can address new and unknown markets. In contrast, running experiments where early product prototypes are shown to customers can address need uncertainty. Q: How should organizations respond when... View Details

Keywords: by Wendy Guild

18 Oct 2010
Lessons from the Classroom

Venture Capital’s Disconnect with Clean Tech

companies can crank out a marketable prototype in a matter of months, clean-tech companies can take years to develop products—solar panels, batteries, biofuels, and the like. And even when a working View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Energy; Utilities; Financial Services

19 Mar 2013
First Look

First Look: March 19

Brown University, in the hope that they will adopt it and fund his company, EverTrue. He lacks the technical knowledge necessary to make the prototype himself, and so has to quickly decide on the best option. He is considering multiple... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

Publications