Potential and Challenges of Prototyping in Product Development and Innovation.

Prototyping represents an established, essential method of product development and innovation, widely accepted across the industry. Obviously, the use of prototypes, i. e., simple representations of a product in development, in order to explore, communicate and evaluate the product idea, can provide many benefits. From a business perspective, a central advantage lies in cost-efficient testing. Consequently, the idea to “fail early”, and to continuously rethink and optimize design decisions before cost-consuming implementations, lies at the heart of prototyping. Still, taking a closer look at prototyping in practice, many organizations do not live up to this ideal. In fact, there are several typical misunderstandings and unsatisfying outcomes regarding the effective use of prototypes (e. g. Christoforakos & Diefenbach [3]; Diefenbach, Chien, Lenz, & Hassenzahl [4]). For example, although prominent literature repeatedly underlines the importance of the fit between a prototyping method or tool and its underlying research question and purpose (e. g. Schneider [7]), practitioners often seem to lack reflection and structure regarding their choice of prototyping approaches. Instead, the used prototypes often simply rest on organizational routines. As a result, prototypes can fail their purpose and might not contribute to the initial research question or aim of prototyping. Furthermore, the varying interests of different stakeholders within the prototyping process are often not considered with much detail either. According to Blomkvist and Holmlid [1], stakeholders of prototyping can be broadly categorized in colleagues (i. e. team members involved in the process of product development), clients (i. e. clients, whom the product is being developed for or potential new clients to be acquired) users (i. e. potential users of the final product). Each of these stakeholders employ different purposes of prototyping due to their distinct responsibilities within the process of product development. Moreover, they can hold different expectations regarding the prototyping process, and thus, have different preferences for certain methods or tools. Yet, the substantial role of stakeholders in the appropriate choice of prototyping approach and methods is often overlooked.