The Importance Of Rapid Prototyping In Innovation Ecosystems

Just gave our board a demo of what we accomplished during a 3-day on-site workshop with Specter Aerospace. In their words, it was something that used to take them eight full weeks done over the course of days. That kind of speed is rare in aerospace for a reason. But when you’ve got the right team, the right tools, and clear requirements, it’s becoming real. Specter’s engineers built and modified a general arrangement from the ground up / first principles in nTop and tied that model into their toolset for understanding mission performance / optimizing the design parameters. Requirements to design in days. That kind of velocity is exactly what DIU, AFWERX, and other DoD innovation arms are leaning into. Rapid prototyping authorities and OTA contracts are rewarding teams that can move fast without losing the thread of mission relevance ( BTW, good podcast here on this: https://lnkd.in/eG3JF7j3 ) This shift is already reshaping the ecosystem. Startups are proving they can field real capability quickly using agile methods, software-first architectures, and modular open systems. And the primes? They’re absolutely paying attention. We’re seeing internal teams, public-private partnerships, and strategic acquisitions accelerate everywhere. The old timelines aren’t defensible anymore. The DoD is pushing for speed. Velocity that’s fused with systems engineering discipline is now the new bar. That’s going to pull a lot of engineers toward teams where there’s less legacy friction and more space for new thinking. The teams that can take a set of requirements and, within days, prove that they can deliver better, faster, and more flexibly than anyone else are going to win more and more opportunities. Who are others making real moves in the space? Curious who you think they are.

"The value of a prototype is in the insight it imparts, not the code" Prototyping lets us fail fast and cheap, or get the data to make a concrete decision on direction. It helps answer the question, "What happens if we try this?". Most significantly, prototyping provides us with the guardrails to safely and productively fail. Prototyping is the right tool if you have an idea to validate, a clear path to get feedback on, or a proposal requiring further data. It provides crucial insights to move forward. By creating a rough version of a feature or system you've been considering, you gain the flexibility to either discard the idea or fully commit to it. It's a skill that assists product and engineering teams in making pivotal business decisions. Whether it's a website, mobile app, or landing page, no matter what product you're working on, it's always essential to verify your design decisions before shipping them to the end-users. Some development teams delay the validation stage until they have a solution that is almost complete. But that's an extremely risky strategy. As we all know, the later we come across the problem, the more costly it becomes to fix it. Luckily, no matter what point you are in the design process, it is still possible to build and test a concrete image of your concept—a prototype. Consider an architect tasked with designing a grand building. Before laying the first stone, the architect crafts a miniature scale model, allowing them to visualize the end result, understand the project's complexities, and present their ideas convincingly to others. However, this model is far from being the final product; it's a means to an end. This principle applies just as aptly in the world of software development. A software prototype—whether it's a low-fidelity wireframe, a high-fidelity interactive model, or a simplified mock-up of a more complex system—is much like the architect's scale model. It's a visual, often interactive, model of the software that provides developers, stakeholders, and users with an early glimpse into the software's workings, long before the final product is ready. The prototype isn't about the code per se; the code is merely a tool used to create it. Instead, it is about gathering valuable insights, comprehending user needs, identifying functional requirements, validating technical feasibility, and discovering potential stumbling blocks that might arise during full-scale development. The prototype's strength lies in its capacity to provide these insights without necessitating a significant investment of time or resources. I'm a big fan of using prototypes in our work at Google. Their value is often high. Wrapping up... The aim of prototyping is not the prototype itself or its immediate output but the knowledge that comes from it. I wrote more on this topic in https://lnkd.in/gEEGFwJp #softwareengineering #programming #ux #design

Faster than FedEx! (a rapid prototyping success story) Several years ago we were working on a medical project involving a plunger / punch mechanism that had a diaphragm seal in the center. I had sketched up a design, thinking about how we would manufacture it (from the start) we found some silicone diaphragm valves from a vendor and they had 6-day shipping. in this case we didn't want to wait around to see if the idea worked. so we fired up the #formlabs SLA printer and printed these little compression molds, with 3mm dowels that we had on hand (for alignment of the two mold halves). I squished some jewelry casting #silicone between the molds and waited 15 minutes. total time, start to part, was about 6 hours that includes sketching, CAD, printing the mold, molding the parts, and testing. we quickly validated that this design idea would work, the assembly strategy would work, and functionally it would work once we had the right silicone materials. so now we could wait the one week lead time with less risk to the schedule I've also successfully used FDM molds with this casting silicone also... you just get a few more layer lines on the surface. so if you're not looking for a watertight seal FDM printing works also. but why do we care about speed in product development? is it because we're impatient? no, will maybe partly... it's because the only asset we can't replace is time. if I wait a week or two to make a design decision that week or two is gone. forever. we can't buy it back. so now your project will be 1 to 2 weeks late hitting the market. and that has real revenue implications. does that matter? maybe not if it happens once, but in R&D we're making hundreds of decisions. if every decision takes a one or two week lead time to make, we can set ourself back months, or years. think about ways to short circuit your exploration cycle. figure out what works as early as possible using the crudest means possible. test rigorously so that in 2-3 months from now you can look back and say "yes we are on the right track, because I identified these high-risk areas and tested them early." don't wait until your entire product is designed and documented to start testing your ideas. test individual bits and pieces of your concept as you are designing it. prototype (in parallel) several different variations and when you pick one you will feel confident that you have explored other options. and if you're stuck trying to figure out how to rapid prototype your ideas, call me or shoot me a DM and I'll help 763-344-1308 #rapidprototyping #design #engineering