Prototyping -what and how?

By Thomas Klem Andersen, Published on september 28th 2015

Last week DTU Skylab hosted an inspiring event on prototyping. Here are some insights that helped me wrap my head aorund the concept.

We so often get sucked into the trance of specifications and feature building forgetting actual user needs in the process. Engineers tend to build maximum viable products before testing them in the market and thereby risk building products that no one will ever use.

Instead you should ask yourselves: What’s the least we can do to satisfy people using only the most needed features? That will be your minimum viable product (MVP). You need to identify what it is you want to validate and then focus on that. What is the least we can do in order to validate the most critical assumptions of our value proposition? Next you find the people having the need our are building a solution for and go test whether you are actually solving their problem.

What is it and what is it not?

When talking about prototypes most people associate with it an early version of the final product which looks like the final product and have some of the same functionalities. Today however the entrepreneurial gospel seems to be that you should prototype as soon as possible and that you can do so successfully in very low fidelity (which is the case with the MVP).

At the Danish product development company Kapacitet they distinguish between functional models and prototypes. Whereas a prototype in their terminology has all the functionalities, the right size, the right materials but is not produced with the right production methods a functional model has some of the key functions but does not necessarily look like the end product.

A functional model can let you test some key assumptions about your value proposition before even building the first version of the final product. As such it can help you reduce risk, save time and money and fail fast if failure is inevitable.

According to Thomas Olund Kristensen, R&D Engineer at Kapacitet you should test commercial feasibility long before you finish your technical development. To emphasize this Anders shared the following ratio: If an idea is worth $1, and the development $100, the advertising is worth $1000 in matter of importance. You have to be quite confident that you have customers before you finish your technical development. You might spend a whole lot of money building something for which you can’t find any customers for in the end.

Serial entrepreneur Jakob Konradsen from DTU (Le Vego, NoviPel, Eupry) agress with Thomas and introduces a thrid concept to the development vocabulary: Pretotyping. Pretotyping is all about testing commercial and technical assumptions as early as possible and even before you are able to present a prototype.

“If you can’t sell the product without a prototype you shouldn’t even build the product. You need to be able to convince people in a 30 sec pitch and you can go far with just a powerpoint slide.” Jakob Konradsen

When pretotyping a simple powepoint slide can serve as your MVP to test commercial feasibility. Jakob elaborated further by saying that engineers are very perfectionistic in relation to technical solutions. In his view better is the enemy of good. No matter how much time you use, there will always be a new version of the product. You’ll never be finished developing.. At one point you just need to stop and take it to the market and see if it can make it.

In the case of the startup Eupry (monitoring of vaccines in the cold chain). Jakov and the team test a very early model in Nigeria expecting Africa to be their prime market. The test showed them that the African market is incredibly hard to penetrade because of conflicts of interest between their product and the users (not the buyers). It proved to be too large of a challenge and Eupry pivoted to a new local market: Danish doctors and they have now tested that there is a market feasible market for them in Denmark.

Available tools

Michael Kai Petersen, associate professor at DTU Compute stressed that today there’s there’s so much infrastructure to build on top of when working on entrepreneurial projects. You really don’t have to start from scratch.

• The business model canvas is great to take all elements around the idea into consideration.Prototyping is about making mockups of the business model as well as the technical solution.
• Arduino and electric imp are great for electronic prototyping 
• 3D printing lets you print early versions to present to partners and customers and they will get it right away. 
• CNC milling lets you build robust physical products fast and easily. 
• Fablabs rants you access to these resspurces. According to Nicolas Padfield, lab leader at RUC Fablab, Fablabs are going to do for things what the internet did for communication. They are the frontrunners of a democratization of production. 
• “Pop” lets you sketch out mockup apps on your smart phone. 

But even with all these ressources readily available the prototyping tool of choice for Michael Kai Petersen is still pencil and paper.

So now there’s no excuse. Go build stuff!

Pretotyping	Funcional modeling	Prototyping
Prior to technical development Commercial feasibility Low fidelity Hand held functionality (concierge etc.) Pretending to have the product Fake it ‘till you make it	During technical development Technical feasibilty Modeling functional parts Make fragments to test	After tech-development, before production Usability High fidelity 1st version of final product Present to sell

Our Dangerous Obsession With The MVP

TechCrunch blog post March 1, 2014 by Bill Aulet (@BillAulet)

Editor’s note: Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the author of the recently released book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup.

Building stuff does not make you a startup.

“But don’t we need to build stuff and iterate quickly?” I get asked a lot.

Well, sure. Once upon a time, when companies used the “old-school” waterfall model to develop products, pushing entrepreneurs to think in terms of building a minimum viable product as quickly as possible made sense. It substantially accelerated the development process. By narrowing the product scope to core features, you start the customer feedback loop quicker and you can more rapidly iterate based on that feedback.

But the pendulum has swung too far toward building stuff and away from spending some time getting to know your customer first. And the result is that more startups are building blindly, without focus, as well as falling victim to the “IKEA effect.”

The IKEA effect, coined by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, is that when you make something yourself, you value it way more than you should. The trio did tests showing that amateur origami makers valued their creations as equal to those made by experts – even though the expert-created pieces were objectively of a much higher quality. The phrase is named after the well-known Swedish furniture chain where “some assembly required” is an understatement. As a result, as soon as we build something, we all tend to move increasingly from inquiry mode to advocacy mode at the very time where the former is needed and the latter can blind us.

As soon as we build something, we all tend to move increasingly from inquiry mode to advocacy mode at the very time where the former is needed and the latter can blind us.

One of our recent alumni teams, who will remain nameless for reasons you’ll quickly see, is absolutely in love with the technology they have created. They have developed some impressive award-winning technology which has the promise to significantly improve the Human Computer Interface. They have built a demo that is in high demand, and each time someone expresses interest in a piece of their technology, they get excited and add some more to address the interested party’s desire. With their demo and impressive technological skills, they have gotten money from business plan competitions and investors, which I think is possibly the worst thing that could have happened to them.

Neither the “someone” watching their demo at a conference nor the business plan judges nor the investors are paying customers. What the team calls an “MVP” is simply a sexy proof of concept. They say they are testing hypotheses, but the hypotheses they are testing relate to technological feasibility. They claim they are “pivoting” – which means they have run out of business ideas but not money – on a regular basis. And as a result, they’re not making progress.

Why are they devoting all their time and money to building when, as a startup, they have precious few resources? Because they built it themselves, and they love it, and they’ll be darned if you tell them their MVP isn’t attracting any paying customers and that they should instead focus on an honest dialogue about customer needs. They are too beholden to the IKEA effect. They claim to be in inquiry mode but really are much more in advocacy mode for what they have developed.

Compare this to another recent alumni team, FINsix. The company won recognition and a slew of awards last month at CES for its product, a miniature laptop power adapter that is a quarter the size of today’s power bricks.

But when they first showed up in my class, they only had a promising technology from the labs. I’m sure that power supply geeks will be impressed by Very High Frequency (VHF) switching that is 1000x faster and with a 10x reduction in converter size. “The elimination of heavy components, like magnetic core transformers, enables superior resistance to mechanical shock and vibration,” according to their website, which sounds like a good thing, too.

However, none of that helps a well-defined group of customers address a pain that they’re willing to pay money to address. FINsix recognized that, and so rather than build, build, build, they took some time to learn about customer needs.

“We were able to test the [VHF switching] concept with many different markets using an electronic brochure and extensive surveying to determine our beachhead market of laptop power suppliers,” co-founder and CEO Vanessa Green told me. A brochure.

There is a lot less emotional investment in an electronic brochure than an MVP that the engineers build. And their analysis allowed them to consider a range of markets, from cell phones to LED lighting, before determining that laptop power adapters were the best way to gain a core group of paying customers that would sustain the company so that it can develop more products.

You can’t develop the right product for your customer if you fall in love with a prototype that nobody wants to buy.

Had they fallen in love with their technology, or the first prototype they built, they may never have gotten to the point of selling a consumer laptop charger. Think that app makers are immune to the dangers of an MVP? Sure, an app has less initial investment required, but otherwise, a business is a business. It’s easier to spin the roulette wheel when you don’t need as much upfront or sustaining capital, but that doesn’t mean you have a solid startup.

You can’t build great products in the dark, without a well-defined customer. And you can’t develop the right product for your customer if you fall in love with a prototype that nobody wants to buy.

So unless your end game is hoping that before the money runs out a competitor will buy you for your engineers or technology, you need to stop obsessively building, and start an honest dialogue with potential customers about their needs. It may not be as fun as tinkering with a “product,” but it is far less stressful than playing the acquisition lottery. That is what we call “disciplined entrepreneurship” where you can have both great technology and great marketing, leading to epic products. It is a false dichotomy to think you can only have great technology or great marketing, as some commenters have recently claimed in a myopic comparison of Stanford and MIT graduates.

Think I’m a conservative East Coast entrepreneurship instructor who’s behind the times? Last week when I was in San Francisco and chatted with David Bergeron of T3 Advisors and Cory Sistrunk and Ed Hall of Rapt Studio, they were right on the same page. “The MVP mentality has unintentionally taken us away from ‘user-centered design’ and a focus on the customer,” they told me. “We have to focus on the WHY before we can focus on the HOW and WHAT.”

For the entrepreneur, stop obsessing about your MVP.  Your first question, before HOW and WHAT, has to be “FOR WHOM?”

Testing the Business Model Canvas

By Thomas Klem Andersen, published on october 23rd 2013

Yesterday we tested Alexander Osterwalders Business Model Canvas in our Lean Startup Study Group at Scion DTU. We all agreed that it's a strong tool for testing existing and or pre/prototyping' alternative business models.

We are looking forward to explore different busines model patterns thursday next week! Check out our schedule and join us here.

Pretotyping – leaner than lean?

By Thomas Klem Andersen, Published on october 18th 2013

The Copenhagen Lean Startup Circle threw an inspiring event on Pretotyping yesterday, hosted at Founders House, delivered by Tim Vang CEO of pretotyping.dk.

The Pretotyping concept is developed by Alberto Savoia, former Google Director of Engineering. The concept was initially coined pretendotype because the most unique aspect of this approach is to pretend or imagine the intended functionality.
Pretotyping is essentially about testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money." (see pretotyping.org)

At Founders House Tim Vang argued that Pretotyping is a tool even more Lean than the Lean startup. It is an in depth supplement to the Lean Startup Movement concepts of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and concierge testing. The pretotyping tool focusses only on the very early phases of innovation – therefore as Tim Vang emphasized it is a hammer and not a Swiss knife as the Lean Startup concept is.

Market testing > product testing
The pretotyping concept emphazises that market testing should precede product testing. In other words it’s all about finding the right it before you build it right. Quickly testing the commercial value  of an idea will let you invest money in a mature way and live up to the Pretotyping tagline: 

 “Invent Like a startup, invest Like a grown up”

Practical testing vs. Abstract analysis

According to Tim Vang focus groups and market analysis are an abstract practice. Desk top research and board room talks can lead you to whatever conclusion. Practical testing and data from the moment of purchase however will prove you right or wrong.


Founders House and its inhabitant Iconfinder

The lively environment at Founders House

Pretend you have a product even before your first prototype and see if customers will buy it. “Fake it ‘till you validate it” could be the mantra until you feel confident that there is a commercial potential for your product.

Pretotyping might be a hammer compared to the Swiss knife of The Lean Startup but in the end it is not an either or, rather as Tim Vang emphasized pretotyping is a part of thinking as a lean startup!

A free PDF copy of the Pretotyping book is available here: http://www.pretotyping.org/pretotype-it---the-book

Prototypes, product development and 3D printing

Open Inspiration at Scion DTU June 12th

The role of prototypes in product development

by John Lynch, Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design (CIID)

The traditional design approach is; when you know enough you prototype

The CIID approach is; you prototype to find out what you don’t already know. Hence you don’t just use your prototypes to validate, you use them to inspire new concepts! And you do that best by leaving gaps, questions and unresolved problems  in your prototypes. That leaves the model open for inspiration, reflection and co-creation. To do that you have to consider the fidelity of your prototype. Low fidelity inspires ideas, high fidelity lets you validate a strong concept.

3D printing lets us play around with this. 3D prints help us address the fourth dimension that is the subtlety of experience early on!

Prototype case: The HipKey

HiPPih build several prototypes including 3D-print models to develop their design of the HipKey for Apple.

Davinci show cased some of the 3D print-opportunities they offer:

Enhance your innovation capacity through collaboration with DTU Diplom

DTU Diplom hosted an excellent match event on the 31^st of May making visible the many collaboration opportunities between their students and companies.

At the event 9 companies pitched their business and the development challenges that they would like to collaborate with tech-students to solve. In between the presentations was scheduled for networking for the students and companies to feel each other out.

Participating in the event were: ANDERTECH Plastteknik A/S, Texo Medical, Vestas Manufacturing, CSM, Dencore Aps, StoreClaus Aps, CCBR, Bo arkitekter and NorthQ Aps.

DTU Diplom, Ballerup Campus yearly sends out more than 250 applied sciences engineer students to train their engineering competencies on actual problems provided from the business life mainly from SME's.

If there is a need to develop and test prototypes and functional models, the students have access to labs and workshops where they can do 3D-modelling, rapid prototyping, reverse engineering as well as development and test of electronics and IT. The students are supported by DTU-teachers that help define the tasks and coach the students.

The studies at DTU Diplom cover the whole value chain from the early concept development with user involvement to international B2B go-to-market strategies and with all the classic engineering professions in between.

Collaboration opportunities:

· Bachelor Projects where typically a team of two students during 5 months create their final project based on a company challenge.

· 20 week internship where the students try out their knowledge and skills solving practical tasks in a company. An internship entails that the students become part of your daily operations and is, as a starting point, paid according to The Danish Society of Engineers’ guidelines.

· Project collaboration - each semester the students work on a series of large or smaller projects in collaboration with an organization. Dependent on project type and your need, the collaboration can vary from 3 weeks to a full semester.

· Involvement in the courses. A huge number of courses use actual problems of organizations as focal points for the teaching. It can be larger or smaller collaborations from a 4 hour lecture and case solving to development projects running the whole semester.

The projects are first and foremost study projects. That means that the students themselves choose the projects they wish to work on. There are time limitations on when the projects can be arranged and completed and we are not a consultancy offering a guaranteed result. It is a collaboration where we strive to make sure that both parties win.

Schedule for project collaboration

Study year	February	March	April	May	June	July & August
	September	October	November	December	January
	Start of projects, internships & courses	Teaching / projects	Teaching / projects	Hand-in of projects	Exams	Teaching free periods
	Projects start	Optimum time to arrange projects for the coming semester.

Discovery driven Innovation at Implement May 14th 2013

By Thomas Klem Andersen, Published on May 15th 2013

Main take aways from an innovation lecture at Implement Consulting Group

We tend to think algorithmically –that is: Reducing complexity to foresee, plan and control. Although we need this kind of thinking, to be innovative we also need to be able to think heuristically –using gut feeling, intuition and holistic perspectives.



Approaches to innovation

Statistics tell us that the biggest pay offs often are found outside the core service. Even though such pay offs does not necessarily follow from investments in areas outside the core service, the statistics reveal that there might be a good reason to allocate more resources in this direction. Furthermore it is clear that the resources in themselves do not make the day. They have to be spend in a skillful way and the investment thus requires some serious consideration. As an example in relation to this the big Danish pump producer Grundfoss have stated that by 2015 a third of their revenue should be should be secured through non-pump activities.   
 

Working principles for innovation suggested by Implement are:

·         Focus on the early phase as the decisions made here will have huge consequences relative to decisions made later.

·         Let the process be knowledge based and include as many different knowledge areas and professional experience in your development team as possible because that will enhance the heuristic competence of your team dramatically.

·         Value and encourage co-creation as the inclution of many different departments and professionals will increase the experience of ownership and consequently the enthusiasm and energy invested in the project.

·         Learn iteratively –build in as many learning loops as possible.

·         Pre and prototype your product and meet the customers early on.

·         Be lean –focus on one project at a time.