Prototype Engineering and Testing for New Idea Creation

Effective prototyping may be the most valuable competence an innovative organization can hope to have.

-Michael Schrage

Does your business conduct prototype engineering and testing of new idea creation? How about trying new ways for innovation?

Before I give you some modern examples of prototype engineering, let me tell you an interesting story about Alexander Fleming. Have you ever heard of Alexander Fleming?

When Alexander Fleming, a brilliant but sometimes haphazard scientist, returned to his lab after vacation holiday in 1928, he found his work ruined. A bacteria culture he had been growing was contaminated by fungus and, as it grew, it killed all the colonies it touched.

Most people would have simply started over, but Fleming was very curious by what had happened. And his curiosity caused him to switch his focus from the bacteria to the fungus itself.

First, identified the mold and the bacteria-killing substance, which he called “penicillin,” then he tested it on other bacteria cultures. Seemingly in a single stroke, Fleming had created the new field of antibiotics.

Is that how you see innovation? That’s how most of us see innovation. A flash of brilliance and Eureka! a new world is born. But not so fast.

The truth is far messier. In fact, it wasn’t until 1943 — nearly two decades later — that penicillin came into widespread use and only then because it was accelerated by the effort helping World War II efforts.

But we need far better and faster results, don’t we? To achieve that, we need to discard old myths and deal with a process of change and innovation as it happens.

Truly breakthrough innovations are never a single event, nor are they achieved by one person, or even within a single organization. Rather, they happen when ideas combine to solve important problems.

Related post: Learn How to Think What No One Else Thinks

In Amanda Lang’s book, “The Power Of Why: Simple Questions That Lead to Success”, she talks about the importance of curiosity and it’s a connection to intelligence:

Curiosity is, therefore, strongly correlated with intelligence. For instance, one longitudinal study of 1,795 kids measured intelligence and curiosity when they were three years old, and then again eight years later. Researchers found that kids who had been equally intelligent at age three were, at eleven, no longer equal.

The ones who’d been more curious at three were now also more intelligent, which isn’t terribly surprising when you consider how curiosity drives the acquisition of knowledge.

The more interested and alert and engaged you are, the more you’re likely to learn and retain. In fact, highly curious kids scored a full twelve points higher on IQ tests than less curious kids did.

As I was reading this book, there were two things that came to my mind:

How often do we ask our staff to brainstorm “questions” as opposed to “answers”? Is this not as valuable a practice?

and then…

Could starting every week off asking “what do you wonder?”, and having them ask questions and provide ideas, make a huge impact on creating new ideas?

So what are some effective ways businesses innovate? Let me ask you a few personal questions to get you thinking about the innovation process a different way.

Do you drive to work the same way every day? Probably! Do you read the same publications — or the same type of publications? Sure! How about TV and the Internet? Watching the same group of shows or using the same set of websites is also a common habit. When you do this, what do you feel? You probably get a lot of familiar and comfortable feelings, don’t you?.

But true innovation often doesn’t make us comfortable. It makes us uncomfortable. And yet, it is in that discomfort that the new ways, the new ideas, and the new feelings come to light. When you drive to work via a different route, you see different places and sights. If you go to the newsstand and peruse the magazines that you never otherwise look at, you will see things you simply would never think about otherwise

So do you think businesses experiment and test lots of new ideas?