Consumers buy products and services to reach a certain outcome or get a specific job done. You buy a car to drive to work and maybe improve your status (if you chose BMW, Audi or a similar premium brand) and you buy a BlackBerry to be able to do your email during a business trip.

Understanding these goals is essential when developing new breakthrough ideas because only then designers and developers are able to create products and services that makes it easier and faster for customers to reach a certain outcome. The best example for this is the integration of the Apple iPod with iTunes. The customer’s goal is to listen to music and this requires also to download music from the Internet and seamlessly upload it to your MP3 player.

In the May 2008 Issue of the Harvard Business Review, the Lance Bettencourt and Anthony Ulwick, consultants at Strategyn have published an article titled “The Customer-Centered Innovation Map” that introduces a tool kit to analyze customer’s job to discover opportunities for breakthrough products and services.

The article can be found online at the HBR store.

Why do I blog this? My research is directed in a similar direction. The goal is to develop a formal method to understand consumer goals and model their behavior using different resources (i.e. products, services, skills) to reach a certain outcome. If you are working in this field as well or if you are interested to find out more, send me an email, I would be interested in exchanging ideas.

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This is a picture of a prototyping set-up for an innovative mobile device that a team of students from the University of St. Gallen and the University of Stanford have built in the course "E310: Global Team-Based Design Innovation”.

I really like this approach to prototyping and the students have done a great job, yet my experience is that if you show prototypes like this around, designer (in this case students) will be confronted with two different kinds of feedback. One response is “I don’t know what this should be and if you try to build it like that it will never work.” Another response is “Yes, I get it. Maybe you can try this and integrate it like that”. It is sometimes difficult to understand how one single design can induce such different reactions but to understand it, one has to look at the different outcomes in an innovation process.

Initially there is an idea, which has to be evaluated and might then be transferred into a concept. This concept itself is evaluated and then transferred into a state that is ready for production. This results in two different kinds of prototypes: one that is the “proof of idea” (showing that your idea actually works and is helpful) and the other one which is a “proof of concept” (that your idea fits into an overall concept).

The reason for the different answers is that for one group prototyping works as a “proof of ideas” while the other group looks at the prototype and interprets it as a “proof of concept” that is ready for production - ready to make money from.

These different perspectives are both valid, yet it is important to communicate what kind of prototype you are showing and what kind of answers you expect. It is no problem when people see a “proof of concept” and think it is a “proof of idea”. The problem is if you show a “proof of idea” and people think it is a “proof of concept” that is ready for manufacturing. Then their feedback will focus on reasons why it is not ready for production (when you actually haven’t even tried to present something that is ready for production).

Is this only relevant for designers creating tangible prototypes? No, it applies to everyone who is working with different ideas to create a concept no matter if it’s a graphic designer, web designer or industrial designer.

The essential point is to present different ideas and explain how they shape the overall concept but one has to clearly distinguish and communicate if it is an “idea prototype” or a “concept prototype”.

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