Episode 3: Prototyping – Turning ideas into reality

[Pamela Spokes]

Welcome to the Innovators at Work podcast. We are both experts and explorers in the areas of service, design, innovation culture, and entrepreneurial thinking. We want to break down these buzzwordy concepts to make them approachable and usable for everyone. We believe that everyone can be an innovator in their own work.

[Juha Järvinen]

In this episode, we will be looking closer at prototyping, turning ideas into reality, and how it is vital to incorporate prototyping when creating something new. I’m Juha Järvinen…

[Pamela]

And I’m Pamela Spokes. Today we’re diving into a topic that sits at the very heart of turning ideas into reality. Prototyping! So, whether you’re dreaming up a new product, designing a service, or reshaping a process, at some point you’ll hit the moment where it’s time to move beyond sticky notes and ideas and actually make something real. That’s where prototyping comes in.

[Juha]

And that’s when you need to roll up your sleeves and start working.

[Pamela]

Yes. So, let’s start at the beginning. There are two main innovation processes that I personally like to use: one is the double diamond approach that was created by the British Design Council, and it consists of, not surprisingly, 2 diamond shapes that reflect the natural divergence and convergence of the process. The double diamond starts with Discover. Then it heads into Define, then to Develop, and then finally to the Deliver phase. Or if we use the Stanford d.School model of design thinking, which is a five-phase process and it goes from Empathy to Define to Ideate, to Prototype and then to test. And each of these phases has a different purpose. So, prototyping sits in the Develop phase of the double diamond and it fits into the prototype stage of the d.School model. And it is that critical point where you stop just thinking about the idea. And start interacting with it.

[Juha]

Right. Prototyping how we move from concept to reality. It’s where we start testing assumptions, spotting flaws and discovering opportunities we didn’t see before. The aim is to test and experiment. Does it work? And furthermore, more importantly, what does not work at the end of the day, the goal is to remove assumptions and the final answers to questions. It’s the bridge between imagining and implementing. At its core, prototyping is about making a version of your idea that others can see, touch, or experience. There are so many ways that your prototype can be made, and the point isn’t to make it perfect. It’s to make it testable.

[Pamela]

Yes, prototypes allow us to experiment, learn and iterate quickly. They help us to understand how new users might interact with our idea. What works, what doesn’t work, and what needs to change. And there are so many ways that we can do that. It is also important to remember that prototypes are actually different from a proof of concept and different from a pilot. Let me give you a little side explanation here. This is something I did in my thesis. 

So, I did this little exploration into the differences of these, so a proof of concept should come from your user research, right. It will tell you whether your idea is a good one or not a good one. In general, you’ll be able to see if what you’re planning is actually responding to their challenges or impacting the problem that you are seeing that people have. If you cannot see how your solution will address their pain points, then you are not validating your idea and therefore there is no proof of concept of the concept that you are thinking about. But piloting a concept on the other hand is a method for testing innovation solutions by placing them in contexts where they function as actual real offerings and in addition to this requirement, it should be noted that due to this perception of it being a real offering, it also requires tactical planning, no different than the actual launch of the offering, which means, in everyday words, that those who you are testing with, they will expect it to work as it’s supposed to work, so that is what a pilot is. This is not what a prototype is. So, there is a difference in the scale of what it is that you’re testing. But everything considered, it [a pilot] should be perceived as a real offering. 

So, prototyping, in reality, comes in between the proof of concept and the piloting, so you want to make sure that you have a proof of concept so that whatever it is that you’re going to make is actually going to address the problems people are having. But it is not yet something that you would offer people to pay money for. So, because the prototype is about having a first glance at and so people can see and touch it and figure out, figure out what it is that you’re trying to do, it’s where you’re trying to make sure that what you’re creating is actually a good fit for the problem that they have. So, you already know the problem. You’ve proven the problem. Now you want to prototype your solution.

[Juha]

Wow. Interesting. Indubitably, the pre incubator program we teach in prototyping is a big part of how we teach entrepreneurship. It’s hands-on, it’s creative, and it’s fun. Since you have been involved in teaching the tool in the Turbiini Starting Your Own Business course, tell us how you cover prototyping.

[Pamela]

So, in the course that I teach, I definitely encourage rapid prototyping, really starting small, testing fast, and basically failing forward. That could mean acting out of service interaction. It could mean building a low fidelity digital prototype or even using Lego to map out a user journey. 

In fact, there are 8 different ways that I teach for prototyping, and the first is role play so, this is where you act out something. The next is cardboard creation or staging, and you can use this for bigger spaces. You can also actually make a cardboard cutout of a phone and use that with paper to create a very, very early prototype for a digital display. We have the Lego walkthroughs of course, where you can use Lego to build environments. 3D printing is good for if you have products. We don’t really use that for services, but it is one way that I do teach. We also have what I call the stuff or proximity prototyping. And that’s just collecting things that are around you, like pens and papers and tape and all these different things. So, you can make a version of what it what you want in a handmade style. And then we have paper dolls which has come from Toyota and that’s, you know, you just kind of walk through the process with these paper dolls that you cut out. 

And the two most useful ones, I would say, are what I call paper digital mockups, which is a little bit like the cardboard thing I explained where you create digital displays on paper, you wireframe them on paper, and then you would draw the interface and then kind of fake click through it. And then we have these digital mockups, and you can use systems like Sketch and Figma and my most favorite one is Marvel app, because it’s a really easy system to use and it has a very low learning curve. But you can also do things where you create the visuals on paper, and then you just take a photo of it and then you can upload it and you can add in hotspots so you can actually create it into a digital prototype and you can test it that way .

[Juha]

What if the prototype is not tangible, but what if it’s service, for example?

[Pamela]

Well, yeah, one of the biggest challenges that people have is that they can’t imagine how they would prototype a service or something that doesn’t have a physical object attached to it. So, prototyping a product, like I said, it’s fairly easy with the right tools, and that’s actually a really good thing to use the 3D printer for and it it’s easy to understand how you would make it and how you would use it and how you would ask others to use it. But services are definitely different. So, what we need to show is how we can take something intangible like a service and make it tangible. And it’s something that people can interact with. Like we said earlier, it should be something that people can see, touch and experience and that’s really important in being able to get people to have their prototypes tested by people outside of themselves. And we do that through one of these eight ways that I mentioned above.

[Juha]

One of our key messages is this, the prototype product is a thinking tool, a conversation starter away to engage others in shaping the solutions. As Alistair Cole and Benjamin Yoskowitz write in their book Lean Analytics, “we sometimes remain in the early-stage founders that in many ways they aren’t building a product, they are building a tool to learn what product to build.” Although the book deals with the development of startups, I think it’s well said and also well describes the central purpose of prototyping. It’s a tool among other useful tools. No more, no less.

[Pamela]

Absolutely. And I really like that comment about building a tool to learn what product to build and this is really showing you that you need to focus on the users’ problem and it doesn’t matter what your solution is, but you need to figure that out and you will through prototyping. 

So, I often get asked in my class what makes a good prototype and for us I like to tell them for us and Turbiini it’s about 3 things: it’s about clarity, it’s about testability, and relevance. So, we want clarity because people need to understand what to do with it. You’ve handed them something and they need to understand what to do with it. So, whether that means the instructions are clear or whether it’s just obvious by what you give them. And testability is important because people need to be able to interact with what you give them and to give you feedback. So, you need to give them tasks to do with it. Relevance itself means that how you interact with it and test it must be relevant to how somebody would actually use it in the real world in the future, in the end. So, it’s important that they make sure that it is relevant.

[Juha]

Right, so, what you are here also saying is that your prototype needs to clearly show the core of your idea. It needs to make sure that someone can interact with it and give feedback. And of course, most importantly, does it relate directly to the problem you’re trying to solve.

[Pamela]

Exactly! What people often get wrong is that they wait too long to get a prototype out into the real world. A prototype doesn’t have to be pretty. In fact, for the first couple of times, it shouldn’t be pretty. It should be pretty scrappy and clunky because you want to test just a few of the things at a time. In the very beginning, it is much better if your prototype is somewhat handmade, but it has to communicate what its purpose is. This is where clarity comes in, and clarity in your instructions is just as important as the prototype itself.

[Juha]

OK, great that it doesn’t have to look great. But the next step in prototyping, and really the purpose in prototyping, is to actually test the concept with users. But this process in itself can be hard. Where do you find testers? How many do you need? What should you be testing?

[Pamela]

Yes, all these questions we get every class that we teach, this is what people want to know and they’re very important questions just as it can be hard to find people to interview and do your user research in the first place, it can be hard to find testers. And when I say hard, the hardest part is probably actually asking. Getting brave enough to ask people, especially people you don’t know. To either be interviewed by you or to test your product is pretty daunting, but it’s important and necessary to move forward with your concept. To do this, your friends and family want you to succeed so badly that they will not necessarily give you a completely honest answer. And they are willing to look past some flaws in their product or service because they love you.

[Juha]

So, it’s important to ask people you don’t know.

[Pamela]

Yes, when you ask people you don’t know, they are more likely to be honest. And that honesty can sometimes be pretty harsh but necessary. Like Mike Tyson famously said, and it so aptly applies to ideas and concepts and innovation “Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.” Prototyping is a way to get punched in the face early. From there, you can move forward faster with a better strategy and a better product or service. So, I even asked ChatGPT if it could give me some examples of companies that got that metaphorical punch in the face, and how those companies dealt with it. 

And here’s what ChatGPT told me: The first example was Netflix versus streaming technology in the early 2000s. It says Netflix originally built its business on DVD rentals by mail when they first tested streaming in the early 2000s, they realized broadband infrastructure was too weak. Users were not ready, and the technology was expensive and clunky. So, instead of abandoning the idea, Netflix slowly built its tech stack and waited until conditions were right. They launched streaming at scale in 2007, and today they’re a global entertainment powerhouse. So, I see Juha, you have the Slack example there, can you give us that one?

[Juha]

Yeah. Their ‘punch’ was that they started as a company called Tiny Speck, which created an online game called Glitch, and despite creative design and devoted Team Glitch, failed commercially. No big audience materialized. And their recovery was that the team realized the internal communication tool that they had built to collaborate remotely was the real gem. They pivoted, polished it, and Slack was born- redefining workplace communication. And I see you have Airbnb. What’s their struggle?

[Pamela]

Yes. So, in the early days, nobody wanted to let strangers stay in their homes. I am not surprised. Growth was painfully slow because of the trust issues. People just didn’t feel safe. So, instead of giving up, Airbnb refocused obsessively on building trust, features better profiles, secure payment systems reviews and host guarantees. They realized the real innovation wasn’t renting beds, it was creating a platform that made people feel safe. 

And I think the real lesson from all of these is that understanding that if your first idea doesn’t work when you kind of put it out there, you have to kind of recalibrate. You may have to pivot your idea, but all is not lost. You have a lot of information on things that people want fixing so you can then go ahead and prototype something different. So, each of these companies had their own problems. They had their own issues that came up when they really tried to use their service. But when you prototype things early enough and you take them out to the people and they test them, you’ll learn these things very quickly. But what are some of the mistakes that many people who are taking part in innovation actually are guilty of?

[Juha]

Well, mistakes and missteps are all part of innovation, but some are more common than others, so the most common one is failing to seek user feedback early enough. And some other important ones are spending too much time on aesthetics rather than function. Overbuilding [is another]: people spend weeks making a prototype too perfect and miss the point. Prototyping without a clear learning goal, testing with the wrong people and falling in love with your solution. And finally, it’s not remembered how the data obtained during the testing phase is collected. It is not enough to test the observations made they must somehow be recovered for further development.

[Pamela]

Whew…each one of those could be a podcast episode on its own, and we talk about these in our Turbiini entrepreneurship course as well. Each one of these will hold you back from progress. There’s a link between prototyping and launching, and the journey needn’t be too long. Feedback should be propelling you forward quickly, and one I want to take a quick side note on: falling in love with your solution. This is a big one. We often think of the solution before we ever really explore the problem. But it is so much more important to be problem-centred than solution-centred. 

I’ve always thought a real disservice was being done when corporate offices say “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”. Well, if that means that there is leeway or room to experiment and see how the problem can be solved. Then great. But oftentimes it does not. They are asking you to find a quick solution, but many times there are hidden aspects to problems that will not be seen without thorough investigation. Which means that the solution that you quickly thought up and love and want to take to your boss or your colleagues is more likely to cause more and different problems down the line. So, it is super important for people when they are creating concepts to centre themselves on the problem. As this is the only way to create a solution that is really impactful, so now I’ll get off my soapbox and we’ll head back to our regularly scheduled podcast on prototyping.

[Juha]

Yes, OK. But thank you for that. And you’re right, the one that I like to emphasize is not involving real users early enough. If you only test with your team you’re just prototyping in an echo chamber and the feedback is worth less than if you take it outside the walls of your bubble. So, now we know what the most common mistakes are in prototyping. How can we go about prototyping in 2025 and beyond? The landscape is changing rapidly with AI. Is there some way that we can incorporate AI into these plans? What are your thoughts on this Pamela?

[Pamela]

I have to say that that this is not my specialty, but I have been trying out some tools for myself for a couple of my side passion projects and this has led me to a site called Lovable. I can communicate with the AI in the site and describe the kind of web app I want to make. I literally have no technical skills, but I can be thorough in my description, and it will begin to build it with me. It is by no means functional, but I can begin to see it take shape in real time. It’s really cool and it’s amazing for someone like me with no technical background. Another way I have been looking into this is to just simply to ask ChatGPT what ways AI can help with prototyping. There are also other tools that are incorporating AI, such as Figma and Miro, etc. These can help mock things up: different experiences, interfaces and content in literal minutes. You can also use something like ChatGPT to spar with you when you’re thinking about features you want to add, or you want to test so you can get it to give you some ideas of what the problems might be. It’s even suggested that AI could predict outcomes, simulate feedback, suggest improvements, etc. But for now, I think I’ll let the real humans have real interactions with what I create. So, personally I’m dubious of it replacing anything that requires actual human emotion. Just because something is technically right doesn’t mean that people will like it, or that they’ll use it. I am more interested in how AI can help more rapidly generate multiple prototype versions digitally and thus drastically accelerate innovation cycles. So, that was my long and elaborate answer. Juha, what about you? What do you think about AI?

[Juha]

I think AI can help generate design ideas also, but here’s the key. It is a tool to help you innovate. It doesn’t replace creativity, it amplifies it. I think perhaps AI is given too much weight in my opinion, because it’s still new and exciting at the moment, and while considering the importance of AI is not our topic today, I would like to add that so far it can’t produce anything very original except by accident and then it is mainly the flaws in the underlying technology, not creativity. Only time will show how useful AI is and how quickly it becomes something as mundane as the laser, which was when, when it was invented, mostly science fiction.

So, whether you are in the university innovation lab or just sketching out ideas on a napkin, prototyping is your gateway to making ideas real. It’s not about what you make, but how you learn from making it and how you share that with the world. Prototyping is about bringing ideas to life, learning quickly and communicating clearly is where creativity meets practicality. Remember, a successful prototype is not about perfection, it’s about progression.

[Pamela]

Right. And we need to remember that we’re still teaching the fundamentals. We’re still teaching empathy, iteration, and curiosity, but now we’re able to teach it with a whole new toolkit. 

Thank you for joining us today on innovators at work. This episode has covered so many issues. And if you take nothing else with you, please take away these three key points. 1) Prototyping early and often will propel you forward faster. 2) prototyping is not about perfection or beauty, it’s about functionality and usefulness and 3) prototyping will save all kinds of time, energy, money, and frustration in the longer run and make your launch much easier.