One of the most important goals of elicitation is to find out what concerns need to be solved through system boundary identification. A key development tool that can tremendously help in this “capturing good requirements” endeavor is the Quick Prototype. The use of quick prototypes can eliminate undesirable product options and Project Scope Creep as well as streamline the creative process by sharpening the focus of the New Product Developer. A Quick Prototype constructed around the customer’s perception of value – price, ease of use, scalability, reliability, versatility and the like –offer a different approach to the measurement than those built around the organization’s perception of value.[1].

To add in the elicitation event of capturing product requirements, there are 2 good practices the New Product Developer should initiate when creating a Quick Prototype:

1. Is to test or validate the Feasibility or Functional Objectives against the Quick Prototype. In doing so, the intended feature/function set of the proposed product’s electronics hardware and or software architecture can be verified as practical and doable or requires additional research endeavors.

1. The second practice relates to demonstrating the Quick Prototype to gain the customer’s feedback so a price can be “stamped” on the value of the embedded innovation of the physical demonstrator.

Conventional wisdom in most corporations is that the Innovation Process drives the prototype development phase of Product Creation. Based on empirical observations of most corporate organizations the innovation process through quick prototyping is the key enabler to the elicitation of requirements for New Product Development. A critical question to ask of the New Product Developer is: “Will more value be obtained from managing the innovation process via elicitation to get a quick prototype, or from better using the quick prototype to manage the innovation process?”  With the aid of a Quick Prototype, the most powerful way to discover and deliver unique value to the customer is to assure the critical feature/function attributes are capture in concert with meaningful elicitation.

[1]. Serious Play: How The World’s Best Companies Simulate and Innovate, M.Schrage, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass., 2000.