Keep prototypes ‘quick and dirty’

Your innovation methods should produce a bunch of ideas, including “crazy” ones.

After paring them down based on critique and analysis, have your designers try out the surviving ideas with “cheap and dirty” prototypes.

“Prototypes should command only as much time, effort and investment as are needed to generate useful feedback and evolve an idea,” says Tim Brown, CEO of the company IDEO. “The more ‘finished’ a prototype seems, the less likely its creators will be to pay attention to and profit from feedback. The goal of prototyping isn’t to finish. It is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take.”

— Adapted from Freedom, Inc., Brian M. Carney and Isaac Getz, Crown Business.