When innovating, you likely focus first on understanding the voice of your customer: the wants, goals, and pain points that ultimately drive their purchasing decisions. Putting yourself in their shoes builds empathy, which often sparks inspiration.
Yet, as noted in the Harvard Business School Online course Design Thinking and Innovation—part of the six-month Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy—empathy and imagination can only take you so far. Eventually, you need a physical product to test so you can determine whether it:
- Solves customer pain points
- Introduces new problems
- Improves existing solutions
That’s why rapid prototyping is essential to the design thinking process. Explore what rapid prototyping is, why it’s vital to innovation, and how to start applying it.
What Is Rapid Prototyping?
A prototype is an early version of a solution—essentially, a trial run before committing to full production. It helps you identify issues and make improvements before launch.
Rapid prototyping applies this principle as soon as a concept exists. The goal is to validate your direction quickly, allowing you to adjust before investing significant time and resources. Iterative by design, rapid prototyping helps test whether your design principles and innovation strategy are viable.
In Design Thinking and Innovation, rapid prototyping is guided by three key principles:
- Find the quickest path to the experience: Use methods that allow you to test assumptions as quickly as possible.
- Doing is the best thinking: Building and testing in the real world provides more insight than planning alone.
- Use materials that keep pace with your ideas: Don’t worry about polish; focus on speed and iteration.
Although often associated with physical products, rapid prototyping also applies to other forms of innovation.
“Prototypes aren’t just for products,“ says HBS Dean Srikant Datar in Design Thinking and Innovation. “New services, models, and strategies can also be rapidly tested to work through assumptions and ensure better innovation outcomes.”
Benefits of Rapid Prototyping
Early innovation requires assumptions about:
- What customers want
- Drawbacks of existing products or services
- Features of an ideal solution
Rapid prototyping tests these assumptions quickly. If they’re correct, you can move forward confidently. If not, you can pivot early, saving time and resources.
“Prototyping allows you to begin scaffolding up the idea that you have without it being fully completed, and allows it to interact with the world,” says Christi Zuber, managing partner and founder of Aspen Labs, in Design Thinking and Innovation. “And by interacting with the world, you skyrocket your learnings about what’s working about it, what’s not working about it, what it could be, and how do I begin to evolve it.”
Although it may seem like extra work, rapid prototyping can actually reduce development time. Discovering a fatal flaw just before launching—a risk with traditional prototyping—means starting over after months or years of effort. Rapid prototyping reduces that risk by surfacing issues earlier.
Rapid Prototyping Process
While there’s no single process for rapid prototyping, the steps below can help you get started.
1. Determine the Question You’re Asking
Identify the core question your prototype must answer. This focus helps you design the right test and select the most suitable method.
“What’s the critical question you’re asking?” Datar poses in Design Thinking and Innovation. “And what’s the fastest way to experience it and test it so that I can keep going to the next experiment?”
One prototype doesn’t need to answer everything. You’ll likely create multiple iterations, each addressing new questions as they arise.
2. Manage Stakeholder Expectations
Early prototypes are rough by design. Without clear communication, stakeholders might mistake them for finished products and judge prematurely.
When presenting your prototype to executives, business leaders, or investors, explain:
- The questions the prototype was built to answer
- How it will evolve through future tests
- What additional questions remain
This keeps stakeholders aligned and prevents room for misinterpretation.
3. Choose the Right Level of Detail
The amount of detail affects speed. In Design Thinking and Innovation, the Near-Far-Sweet framework helps determine the level of granularity required.
According to the framework, innovations can fall into three general camps:
- “Near” concepts: Close to existing solutions; an example would be deciding to update an existing device
- “Far” concepts: Radically different from the current reality; for example, deciding to create a brand-new type of device
- “Sweet” concepts: Somewhere in between
“Far” concepts require less detailed prototypes since early innovation questions focus on feasibility and customer needs. “Near” concepts, being further along in development, usually require more detail.
4. Select Prototyping Methods and Tools
Resist the urge to build a polished version first. Instead, choose methods that get the idea into the real world quickly.
For digital products like apps, use tools such as paper prototyping, wireframing, or storyboarding to test assumptions more quickly than coding. For physical products, methods such as CAD modeling, 3D printing, or CNC machining enable quick iterations and small batches. Rapid prototyping doesn’t have to be high-tech—early versions can often be built by hand with simple tools and materials.
In the online course Launching Tech Ventures, Squire co-founders Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant describe how they built an early version of their barber booking and payment app in just one month—only to discover they were solving only half their audience’s problems. Testing an early, non-polished prototype revealed that it didn’t meet the barbershops’ needs.
“While their initial focus on end consumers might be considered a failure, it proved to be an important lesson for their customer value proposition,” says HBS Professor Jeffrey Bussgang, who teaches Launching Tech Ventures.
5. Gather Observations and Iterate
Once you’ve built a prototype, test it and ask:
- Does it meet your original goals?
- Are your assumptions confirmed or disproven?
- Would customers actually use it?
- What new challenges or questions emerge?
As you iterate, make sure you’re testing with the right audience. The Launching Tech Ventures course emphasizes defining an ideal customer profile (ICP) to focus your experiments on the customers most likely to benefit. A clear ICP helps you interpret test results accurately and refine features that align with real user “must-haves.”
From Prototype to Finished Product
Rapid prototyping enables you to answer critical questions more quickly and reduce the risk of costly failures.
If your organization relies on traditional prototyping, consider how your processes might benefit from shifting to rapid prototyping. Pair it with other design thinking practices to further enhance your innovation process.
Ready to learn specific rapid prototyping techniques you can apply to your innovation journey? Explore the Credential of Digital Innovation and Strategy, which includes the online course Design Thinking and Innovation. You might also consider Launching Tech Ventures to learn about go-to-market strategies and product market-fit experiments.
