Leaders Make the Future, 2nd Edition

8 Rapid Prototyping

Ability to create quick early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures.

When we change the way we communicate, we change society. CLAY SHIRKY

IN ORDER TO MAKE THE FUTURE, you have to prototype it first. The resources for rapid prototyping will be magnified and amplified incredibly over the next decade, as Clay Shirky’s work points out convincingly:

This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time ...