Innovation—the creation of new and useful products and services—is often at the heart of entrepreneurship. To create economic and social value, entrepreneurs develop new products, processes, and business models to satisfy unmet needs in the marketplace.
Introducing a new product or service involves substantial risk, and upwards of 50–90% of innovations fail, depending on industry.1 Also, there is often a large gap between what the entrepreneur believes is valuable and what the target customer—the ultimate judge—perceives.
Prototyping, both products and services alike, is one strategy to test key assumptions about what a customer will value and be willing to buy. Although you may think of a prototype as an elaborate model that requires special technical skills to create, with a little creativity, any entrepreneur can make a basic prototype to answer a range of vital questions, including the following:
Does my target customer want the new product I propose creating?
How might I alter the product or service to make it more attractive to my target market?
And how does my proposed innovation compare against existing solutions in the marketplace?
This chapter discusses the importance of the prototyping process in exploring and shaping entrepreneurial opportunities, with a special emphasis on steps entrepreneurs ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
