Being Disciplined...as Fast as You Can!

It was a busy weekend for my company.  I took part in a rapid prototyping workshop on Saturday where participating companies:

- Pitch to a room of professionals in the entrepreneurial sector
- Create enough excitement around their idea that professionals join your team for a day
- Lead the newly formed team in a series of rapid prototyping to build up the business

As one of the participating companies, I had to complete a good amount of prep work for the event.  I watched a video from Tom Chi of Google X on rapid prototyping in which Chi argues that this approach to learning and testing is a far better way to hedge against the risk companies take on when starting new ventures.  This involves creating, demoing and testing prototypes of your business in 20-30 minute intervals repeatedly for an entire afternoon.

Having read our article for this week, I was intrigued at learning more about ways to innovate without exposing my company to very much risk (financial or otherwise).  Turns out that rapid-prototyping offers some terrific benefits that I had not previously considered:

1) You are encouraged to “learn fast.”  Oftentimes when starting a company, you can convince yourself that a steady, calculated approach will yield the best results.  Throughout the day, my team and I quickly pulled together concepts for media outreach, business planning and customer acquisition that I would normally have taken weeks to dote over privately before testing.  We tested immediately, learned what was flawed, and tested again.  The result was a polished, tested version of each deliverable, all in one afternoon.

2)  Turns out you can “prototype” processes and interactions, which I did not know.  Being a services company, the term prototyping seemed too techy to apply to my work.  By the end of the workshop, I had prototyped pitches, conversations, even tweets that I could feasibly send out on behalf of my company.  

3)  The iterations are not linear in nature, but still incredibly valuable.  When prototyping our pitch to businesses who would hire our students, we received three sets of feedback that conflicted in nature.  One CEO wanted more information about the social cause, another ignored the social impact completely, and another said to spend about half of our time on the social mission and half on the business mission.  As our team tried to make sense of these results, we came to the following conclusion: we will need pitches to address all three types of CEOs.  The first CEO we spoke with ran a non-profit herself, the second a staffing company, and the third a press relations firm.  After contextualizing their backgrounds, we knew why the priorities were mixed and why we had to adapt accordingly.  Very valuable information.

4)  It’s cheap as all heck.  Taking into account how much my time and limited resources are worth, it really matters how long it takes me to develop certain strategic pieces of my business.  To have a team of eight people working on key issues in your company for a day is a huge boost in innovation for little to no cost.

I would recommend similar events to any entrepreneur who has a terrific idea being developed that requires testing.  Rapid prototyping constitutes a fast-paced, yet still disciplined approach to innovating in the entrepreneurial space.

What concepts, processes, products and conversations do you need to test cheaply and effectively?

Source:

Disciplined Entrepreneurship (Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2004)