Corporate Innovation Management: The Role of Prototyping

I want to call out another specific point from my previous article, Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion.

In my interview with Jim Euchner for the Research-Technology Management journal, I said:

My philosophy, at least in the IT space, is that we can safely assume that people will be able to build their products. Prototyping is not what we emphasize until later in the process. The first thing—the first order of business—is answering the question as to whether there is a business case for doing the project.

Prototyping will come later, if we decide that the business case is sound and warrants investment.

Let me be clear. You need to understand the customer value proposition to create the business case, but you don’t need to write a single line of code to do this. You can understand whether there is value in what you are proposing to do by talking to customers. We encourage people to get an immense amount of customer immersion before actually developing their products.

Product development is an expensive process, and we want to get business case validation before investing in product development.

The methodology we’re using to run corporate innovation processes on the 1M/1M Incubator In A Box platform assumes the above, and accordingly, trains Intrapreneurs to first position the product, assess business model, pricing model, bottom-up TAM, etc.

I am happy to discuss this topic in the comments, so please feel free to weigh in with your points of views.

Photo credit: Office Now/Flickr.com.

This segment is a part in the series : Corporate Innovation Management