Turning Ideas into Reality

Prototyping is a fastest way of turning a concept into reality.

An → experimental hands-on try-it-out approach is invaluable to → innovation . You never know the real value of your invention until you test market it. Rapid prototyping is about building and testing new things fast. It helps you jump past endless analysis to quickly obtain a valuable → feedback.

→ Learning SWOT Questions

"Before there is a prototype, the ideas exists in abstract form only," writes Paul Sloane, the author of The Leader's Guide To Lateral Thinking. "It is described in words and leaves scope for misunderstanding. It is hard for the originator to convey exactly what he or she has in mind, and it is easy for people to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. Once the prototype exists then people can see and touch and feel the idea. Comments for → improvement will flow thick and fast. Whether the prototype is a model in cardboard and string or a software application consisting of a few skeleton screens with nothing behind them, it presents a framework for refinement and extension of the idea."

 → The Jazz of Innovation: 11 Guiding Principles

A Source of Inspiration

Once you start making prototypes, you you find a new source of → inspiration and open up new possibilities of discovery. You are also likely to encourage accidental discoveries... More

→ IDEO's 6 Innovation Practice Tips

 Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg is an incredible → entrepreneur and a billionaire, and also a Mayor of New York City. In his book Bloomberg By Bloomberg he writes, "We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our → competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version No. 5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We → act from day one; others plan how to plan – for months.'

 Discovery of the Structure of DNA

Source: The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley

"I decided that no harm could come from spending a few days building backbone models," said 1963 Nobel Prize winner James Watson, referring to the metal prototypes he and fellow geneticist Francis Crick used to model and test their hypotheses. "Perhaps a week of solid fiddling with the molecular models would be necessary to make us absolutely sure we had the right answer."

Although their academic colleagues were skeptical of the approach, Watson and Crick's freethinking style and openness to two-dimensional and three-dimensional prototyping helped guide them toward the momentous discovery of the structure of DNA. Even Watson sometimes wondered if he was floundering. "My doodling of the bases on paper at first got nowhere. Not until the middle of the next week, however, did a nontrivial idea emerge. It came while I was drawing the fused rings of adenine on paper."