Grand doyens Black & Decker, Dyson, Honda, Motorola, and Sony know how to innovate at speed. Months, instead of years, to get a brand new product platform to market. ‘But how?,’ you may ask. ‘How do these top firms achieve warp-speed innovation on a consistent basis?’ ‘Moreover, how can my company turn itself in a proverbial rapid innovation machine?’

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The Answer: Get Real. Turn your company into a real-world, real-time, rapid prototype centred organisation. Overwhelming evidence points out that companies who have a hands-on physical prototyping approach to new product design/development, get faster results…. How?.…Here’s 10 Get Real guidelines:

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• Get real serious capital investment. New product innovation is several orders of magnitude more difficult and time-consuming than any other activity in business - fact. Prototyping is the single most significant activity within innovation, in terms of the value-adding information it gives up - fact. Prototyping de-risks uncertainty and accelerates learning - fact. Whether you are in traditional manufacturing of big machines, or leading edge development of pharmaceuticals, or radically innovative financial services, your capital investment programme had better be taken seriously, above and beyond all other processes when it comes to rapid prototyping equipment. Of course, it is not how much, but how funds are spent that has impact. But without significant budgets in the first place, you will not afford the kit that gives the order-of-magnitude jump in prototyping productivity necessary for rapid innovation.
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  Get real collocated prototyping facilities. Facilities that manifest rapid results and accelerate learning, means having the prototype facility collocated dead centre of the project working environment; that’s designing, prototyping, experimenting, integrating, testing, concluding and feedback. The amount of businesses I visit, whether service or manufacturing, that lack any such facility is still to high. Even so, those that do, have these facilities dispersed around the organisation. A collocated facility: (1) gives the opportunity to carry out down-stream process prototyping up-stream; (2) gives clear line of sight, and (3) gives constant and instant feedback
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• Get real redundancy in your prototype processes to avoid job queue. Multiple parallel rapid design/prototyping/testing tools and processes eliminate bottlenecks (don’t get caught up in the one big machine trap). I know of a major manufacturer of gas-turbines, that invested heavily in a mega integrated piece of kit, to replace the older kit which was made up of about half-dozen smaller, discrete systems. As the integrated mega-kit was commissioned, they decided to chuck-out the ‘shabby’ older kit. Afterall, the new mega-kit would do all the jobs at once - they thought. What happened?… The mega-kit caused a major bottleneck, as the down time in set-up and set-down, took much longer. Furthermore, even when one particular test was needed, the mega-system was the only kit available to do the trial. Straight away, queues of work-in-progress mounted up, which caused major delays in the development process. So multiple, parallel, appropriate scale prototyping technology is the goal here. Build in redundancy to enable simultaneous and rapid design/prototype/test cycles.
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  Get real straightforward prototyping. Sony’s consumer products division is a whirlwind of real-world, real-time prototyping. It takes Sony, on average, 5 working days from spark of an idea to aesthetic model and functioning breadboard. Yes, five days. This is not only a mandate from on high, it’s the normal practice. Former Sony chief exec Nobuyuki Idei tells me that he constantly encouraged designers and engineers to build, ad hoc, what they have in mind from ballpark sketch and concept, with no formal fuss. Furthermore, Sony’s development teams are trained in the art and science of prototype experimentation and have the skills and tools to make from scratch just about any mechatronic part. At Black & Decker it’s a similar story. Even the most senior engineers roll up their sleeves and make working prototypes. B&D engineers believe that the detail drawing at the prototype stage only delays progress. Engineers have a Get Real feel for their raw ideas without having to wait; cutting down prototype cycle-time from a matter of weeks to days; and quite often hours. Do you do this? Or do you fill in a form and wait a couple of weeks? The difference is telling.
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  Get real accelerated feedback and learning before output. The primary objective for any prototype experiment is to effect high levels of learning about how a new product behaves in its working environment before transfer into production operations, and thereafter launch into marketplace (output). In far to many cases this kind of learning is achieved after a new product is put into production and/or launched. This orientation causes acute learning disabilities within the new product process, and reason number one for quite poor design performance ranging from commercial mismatch, inadequate reliability engineering, inferior functional fit and finish, and uncompetitive unit cost. To accelerate learning before output, one must accelerate and amplify feedback from both tests in the lab and trials in the market. To do that, one must accelerate the so-called design-prototype-test (DTP) cycle. Clearly, TCT productivity tools and services are key to this. The faster the DPT cycle, the faster learning occurs.
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  Get real prototype failures, fast. Paradoxically, a key to both derisking and accelerating a project, is to fail earliest. The earlier a prototype fails, the faster you derisk and/or learn. As James Dyson says, ‘If it works, and especially if it works first time, you learn nothing!’ Here, in terms of the new product process, the management maxim of Right First Time is out; and Accelerate Learning Every Time is in. So, treat all prototype failures as learning experiments. The late Soichiro Honda, co-founder of the Honda Motor Co often said, ‘Success comes from ninety-nine percent failure and introspection.’ He lived by the belief that a failed experiment can tell you what direction to go next, or how a design could be improved. So, think about why a project failed. Ask others why they think it bombed. Ask who the project affects (the customer) why it flopped. Prototypes are first and last, and all in between, there to learn from, to toy with, to take to the limits, to see how it behaves under duress.
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  Get real tests from the highest value and most sensitive experiments; first. To further accelerate learning, focus on the highest value and most sensitive experiments earliest. The greater the success rate experienced with the most valuable and sensitive experiments, the more reliable and valuable an innovation is likely to be. A high value experiment is one that is unlikely to be successful, yet is successful. That is, if a complex or novel piece of technology or process is made to work reliably, you are likely to gain a competitive advantage and increase the premium for that technology. In parallel, a sensitive experiment is one that is either uncertain in terms of outcome, or one that dramatically affects down-stream activities. Without attention to the highest value and most sensitive experiments earliest, a prototype can move down a less than satisfactory path. For example, aircraft engines have to contend with the possible ingestion of flocks of birds. So one of the vital things you do to qualify an engine is to go out at some point to your local chicken farm, buy several gross of chickens, put them into the barrel of a huge 'Chicken gun' and fire them at the engine. It is the ultimate sensitivity test. Now consider this: a well known aerospace firm spent several years and about a £100 million on a new graphite based jet turbine; then it fails the Chicken test. Reworking cost them a big share of the market.
  Furthermore, if the more sensitive tests are left until later, many of the more certain outcome experiments will simply be a vein and wasted effort. The key here is to search for the most uncertain problems or concepts. Ask: what can you quickly do right now, without fuss, that will prove or disprove the direction you think we should go?
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• Get real prototypes to breaking point as quickly as possible. Accelerated strife (stress-life) experiments push the design to its limits prematurely. After all, the true nature of any performance experiment is to move what you are trying to learn to its breaking point. If not, learning before (output) production and market launch will be wholly disabled. This is achieved by gradually raising the loads and changing the environmental strains to the point where the prototype or final product, passively or catastrophically fails. This gives insight into areas for improvement and/or potential early failure in the field. TCT prototype experiments is key to this. For example, durable products, such as Sony’s MP3 players or Motorola razor thin cell phones, go through traumatic strife experiments and tests covering any failure mode from zapping with static electricity, dropping on to concrete from 3 meters, baking at elevated temperatures for months on end, and so on. Through rapid prototype experiments Sony and Motorola are continually finding new ways to make their product’s performance more robust and reliable under extreme environmental and user stresses and strains.
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  Get real prototyping the product and process simultaneously. The long and growing list of rapid design, prototyping and manufacturing tools and techniques allows both the design and production engineer to integrate product-processes development. By contrast, companies that refuse to work in this way are quite limited in both production process innovation and rapid cycle development. For example, production ramp-up (the time it takes to reach full volume capacity); is a critical issue for Break-Even-Time (the time it takes to recover capital investment). Hence, production process proofing must start way before development ends. From this stand-point, we have to adopt a mind-set that product-manufacture-production, are one whole. No one piece of the product can be conceptualised, developed and commercialised in isolation. All things here need to be considered in the light of other things. Motorola insist that production process development is collocated within product development. Motorola’s cell phone division, broke time-to-market records for introducing a new range of hands free phones. Each experiment considered both product and process as an integrated system. By the time product development had been completed, all the major production process problems had been ironed out. Each stage fed from each other. Unorthodox design and process innovations were realised, impossible under the old regime. Ramp-up to full scale production happened for the first time without fuss. This is simple stuff, but few do it.
  
• Get real user centric prototype experiments. Centre the prototyping activity around the customers and providers who will purchase, use, abuse, transport, make, serve, maintain, and re-cycle the contraption. The reason is that what is considered high value in the market, is not determined internally. Unfortunately, too many firms ignore the customer when experimenting with prototypes. At the end of the day, it is the customer who is the judge, jury and executioner. The message here; get the real prototype into the market, today. Knock something up. Get some customers in. Try it where it will ultimately be judged. Get the ‘thing’ (service or otherwise) among real customer A.S.A.P. Within 10 days for a light M/C, within 60 days for a new car; it doesn't have to look pretty, comments are what you want and lots of them; and do it again and again until it ends up in the market on a full-time basis. Learn and feedback into the prototype.