If you cannot innovate in rapid sprints, you will get left behind. Rapid prototyping requires a focus on saving time and money because what you're trying to do is not to develop a product, you're trying to validate and understand what works and what doesn't work. Trust me when I say that you will probably get it wrong the first few times, and you're not gonna know that you got it wrong until you put something out there and that's why it's important to do it cheaply and do it quickly. In other words, the no, no, no is what will lead you to the yes, yes, yes. You solidify an innovation or innovative solution by overthinking it and by over prototyping it but rather by prototyping it quickly, getting it into the hands of users, and then reiterating it based on their feedback.

Strategic planning versus strategic doing has hit such a raw nerve in our corporate counterparts and honestly, we’ve been more interested at the whole mechanism of strategic doing instead. Big companies know very well the pitfalls that they repeat year after year, sometimes quarter after quarter about strategic planning. It becomes almost like a checklist of things that need to be done and as a result very little of their strategic plans actually come to fruition. Strategic doing is figuring out the strategy not by planning and doing three year forecasts but by saying, okay, let's prototype this - what works and what doesn’t work?

A very practical way to start any prototype is to utilize the three R's. Rough, Rapid, and Reasonable. Rough meaning can you create a prototype with the resources you have? Rapid meaning can I create a prototype quickly given the constraints present? Lastly, is my prototype reasonable, is it logical?

Prototyping is so helpful, and it really requires gathering feedback from customers, because if people aren't interested in what you have to offer, then there's no point in even developing it. It’s important early on, without having to spend anything, to be able to gather data and feedback in order to reiterate your prototype because it might help you realize that okay, maybe we should take our idea in a different direction, or keep going in this direction. More often than not we want to deliver our customers a home run, that all-in-one business solution or innovation. But if you put all your eggs in one basket and people aren't interested in it, you’ve wasted time, energy, and money. That's something I learned the hard way based on my own businesses. I was too confident in myself thinking that because it's my idea, it’s going to work, it’s going to be a hit. That’s really not the case, and if I prototyped and reiterated step-by-step, and little-by-little, I wouldn’t have had these failures. So through my past experiences, I’ve really learned that you don't have to build the actual product or service in full, but rather use the practice of rapid prototyping and gathering data first in order to figure out if it's going to work and if it’s worth the resources you have.