Pretotype - First Things First (it’s not a typo!)
Pretotyping was born by the hands of Alberto Savoia while he was Technical Director and Innovation Agitator at Google in 2009. He realised that too often innovators focus on the product they are developing and forget of the customers / users to whom it is targeted.
Since then Pretotyping has become a prominent tool for innovators in Google and many Fortune 500 companies in the US and more recently in Europe.
In early 2015 we at PretotypeCo worked with Google EMEA CSI:Lab to integrate Pretotyping and Design Thinking in a proprietary approach to innovation, which is used for Google internal training as well as key corporate clients training.
As promised, let me start this post series by answering the question “What is Pretotyping?” through the 6 Pretotype Memes (maybe they are not memes yet, I count on you to make them become such!)
The Law of Failure.
A simple piece of stats: 80% of innovations fail. Year-in year-out the percentage does not change. See a breakdown of Nielsen data for a recent year below.
80% of innovations fail. Even if they are competently executed.
No more than 20% of innovations manage to become a success.
Why should a CEO or Innovator live with such a meagre success rate?
Just because that’s what your industry has been doing forever you shouldn’t live with it. Isn’t that wasting the company’s money?
F.L.O.P.
Let’s dig a little deeper and ask why do innovations fail. Why an innovation becomes a F.L.O.P.?
Because of Failure in Launch Operations or Premises.
Getting the innovation’s Launch right is a matter of execution. And yes, managers who know what they are doing should not fail here.
Operations, AKA “will the innovation deliver as expected?” Again, any respectable manager knows how to get operations right.
Most often than not, the reason for failure lays in the Premises. Will customers or users want it? Will they use it?
Hmm, how can you know it in advance?
Don’t Ask. Literally.
A full set of tools to learn from customers is available. What they would like, how they would like it, how much would they pay for it, even how many times would they buy it every week or month!
Sure you can ask everything you want, run amazing surveys, improved by one to one interviews, and finally confirmed by focus groups.
So impressive!
Trouble is, people are not good at all at anticipating their real behaviour and the output you get is a pile of trash. Oops, you got in Thoughtland.
Thoughtland. False Positives, False Negatives.
Thoughtland is a place inhabited by infinite ideas and infinite opinions about these ideas. It’s a place where you can prove everything and the opposite of everything.
It’s a place where a Segway is a great success! How wouldn’t anybody want a chariot-like contraption to happily ride like a modern Roman auriga?
It’s also a place where Twitter is a failure. Why would anybody be interested in broadcasting their SMS to the world? Who would care?
You want to get out of thoughtland A.S.A.P.
Get The Innovation In Front of Customers
The only way to learn whether customers might be interested in an innovation is in real life. Get the innovation to them and measure their actions not intentions.
Actions Not Intentions
Will it raise their interest? Will they buy it / use it? Will they do it again and again?
Huh? How is this different from what we’ve done forever? Build a product and hope that the market will want it. Nope.
The essence of pretotyping is that you want to bring your innovation in front of your customers before you even develop a prototype (hence the word: pre-totype).
Pretotype it!
To Pretotype means
to Validate Initial Interest for and Actual Use of an innovation Objectively and With the Minimum Investment of Time and Money.
Pretotyping brings you a set of techniques to do exactly this. Do you really need an actual, fully developed product to learn about your customers interest? Isn’t it overkill?
What about running simple, controlled experiments instead, to test and validate your assumptions about your customers real propensity to act in front of your product?
Be it “Download it,” “use it,” “refer it,” whatever you expect your customers to do with your innovation, run experiments to validate that they will really react as you expect. Or how else they will behave. And change your innovation accordingly. Because you want to bring them something valuable, not force them to like what you think they should, you’re not Steve! (More on Steve and Pretotyping in a future post. Believe it or not, he was also pretotyping!)
What Next?
I’m going to write extensively about
- Pretotype categories and their use
- the Pretotype process for innovation
- Pretotyping and Design Thinking
- many Pretotype handy tools
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