The common story goes something like this:
A brilliant – or at least enthusiastic – person has a great idea that will change the world and make millions. They find support for their idea and gather all the resources they need to make it. A year or two later their idea becomes reality in the form of some nifty product and guess what... nobody wants it. Or maybe lots of people want it but nobody is willing to pay enough for it to cover the production cost. Or maybe lots of people want it and they're all comfortable with the price but it turns out that distribution and marketing are infeasible because its too expensive to reach customers.
You know the story.
The point is, no matter how good you think your idea is, you don't know how good it is until it is in the hands of its intended audience. So the challenge is to get there as quickly and cheaply as possible, and be ready to adjust as you go. This iterative process of building, testing, learning and adjusting is also inherent to Agile & Lean, Design Thinking and many other popular modern processes.
We can learn a lot about rapid prototyping from startups, especially in the tech space, as it's what they live for.
A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
– From What’s A Startup? First Principles, by Steve Blank.
And it's this kind of "startup mentality" that so many organisations outside Silicon Valley and the tech sector are so keen to adopt. A startup is basically a vehicle created to test a hypothesis that its founders have about the market before running out of money. The faster and cheaper you can learn from real customers about the validity of your idea, the sooner you can adapt based on those learnings and go round again with an adjusted or novel hypothesis.
Or, in language popularised by The Lean Startup, you need to go through the build-measure-learn loop to test a minimum viable product, then pivot as many times as you need to to take off before you run out of runway.
When you apply this thinking to every new idea – always seeking the most efficient way to attain validated learning – some surprising questions and methods can emerge, like:
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Beware of your own confirmation bias! You're looking for unbiased data from real customers, or as close as you can get to it. Just because people tell you they like your widget, doesn't mean they'll buy it.
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In the Digital Revolution, human industry shifted from "atoms to bits" but now we’re swinging back, as the atoms themselves become the new bits. Where the digital world brought the costs of publishing, communication and learning down to the level of discretionary income, the same thing is now happening with the tools of production.
Manufacturing has been democratised by machines such as 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC machines, which allow ordinary people to build things from the nanoscale to the size of buildings, often for pocket change.
Apply the principle of rapid prototyping to low-cost manufacturing tools and you can now test your ideas in the physical space almost as readily as in the digital. A prototype can be bashed out in your home, local makerspace or via an online manufacturing service, then iterated on before farming out a larger production-run of the the final design to a specialised factory, then selling through an online shop. In this way, you can go from idea to global production without needing to fit out your own manufacturing facilities or distribution network.
For an overview of this movement, read Making it Through the Third Industrial Revolution, by Neoco founder Ben Bland.