Prototyping Business Ideas

PROTOTYPING BUSINESS IDEAS
Vincenzo Di Maria
Bologna 03.02.2021

Bologna 03.02.2021 | Prototyping business ideas | Vincenzo Di Maria @vdmdesign vincenzo@commongroundpeople.com
Prototyping business ideas
To prototype a business idea we need to think like designers and act as entrepreneurs,
which means taking some creative risks and making a move before having all the answers.

Vincenzo Di Maria | Service Designer
19 Scicli (Sicily)
4 Rome
6 London
2 Lisbon
4 Siracusa
3 Bologna

My professional network

A new form of design consultancy

Prototyping a dream

Between 1899 and 1905, the Wright brothers conducted a program of aeronautical research and
experimentation that led to the first successful powered airplane in 1903 and a refined, practical
flying machine two years later. All successful airplanes since then have incorporated the basic
design elements of the 1903 Wright Flyer.
Embracing failure

Prototyping: turning an idea into something real

Overlapping terminologies

When should we prototype?

Pretotyping: fail earlier, succeed sooner.

Bologna 2021 | A daily gesture

London 2007 | James Dyson: designer, entrepreneur

A “prototyping obsession”

Daring to fail and learning from experiments

A leadership example for the younger generations

However, that doesn’t work for professional cleaners

My mum will always prefer broom and dustpan

London 2009 | Alexander Osterwalder: economist

Designing business models

Visualising, collaborating, iterating

Practical tools for designers, innovators & entrepreneurs

For people starting up or transforming businesses

What about “business model” as usual?

My accountant will always prefer Excel

Dare to test your assumptions

44 experiments to test your business ideas

strategyzer.com/invincible
Written by
Alex Osterwalder
Yves Pigneur
Fred Etiemble
Alan Smith
Designed by
Chris White
Trish Papadakos
You’re holding a guide to the world’s best business models.
Use it to inspire your own portfolio of new ideas and reinventions.
Design a culture of innovation and transformation to become…
This book integrates with
Business Model Generation,
Value Proposition Design,
& Testing Business Ideas
International Bestsellers
40+ Languages
Series
The
Invincib+e
Company
vii
To stay ahead of everybody else and beat
disruption you need to constantly reinvent
yourself. Business Models expire faster
than ever before and you don’t want to
become obsolete alongside their decline.
Competition increasingly comes from
unexpected places like insurgent startups
in addition to traditional incumbent rivals.
Invincible Companies constantly reinvent
who they are and where and how they com-
pete in order to stay relevant and ahead.
It is increasingly a rat race to compete on
new products, services, price and tech-
nologies alone. Leave competitors behind
and maximize market opportunities, new
customer needs and emerging technologies
by embedding them in superior business
models. Design, test, and build superior
business models that disrupt others and are
hard to disrupt.
The most successful organizations aren’t
confined by industry boundaries or
industry forces. In fact, they often crush
industry boundaries and disrupt others.
Their business model or portfolio of busi-
nesses is not the result of the area they
work in, it comes from an organization that
constantly explores new ways to create
value around market opportunities.
Constantly
Reinvent Yourself
Compete on Superior
Business Models
Transcend
Industry Boundaries
Discover how to manage and
improve what you have and
simultaneously explore the future
with business model portfolios.
Design, implement, and manage
an innovation culture to constantly
feed your innovation funnel and
stay relevant.
Discover how to design, test,
and manage superior business
models.
Apply business model patterns
to make the best out of market
opportunities, new technologies,
and product and service
innovations.
Discover how to create and
manage an ambidextrous
organization that is capable of
improving your core business
and exploring completely new
opportunities beyond traditional
industry boundaries.
Learn how Chinese Ping An
evolved from a traditional
banking and insurance conglom-
erate to a technology group
that competes in five distinct
arenas and became one of the
world’s largest companies.
…and create more value

6
EXPLORE + 7
EXPLOIT
+
Ambidextrous companies

SEARCH
Turning business ideas
into value propositions
that matter to customers,
embedded in scalable
and profitable
business models
GROW
Scaling new businesses
and improving or reinventing
established ones
9
Explore Exploit
High uncertainty Low uncertainty
Design Thinking serving business innovation

Expected
Return
Return
Innovation Risk
Death & Disruption Risk
Exploit
Explore
11
TOOL
Innovation Risk
The risk that a (convincing)
business idea is going to fail.
Risk is high when there is little
evidence beyond slides and
spreadsheets to support the
success chances of an idea. Risk
decreases with the amount of
evidence that supports the desir-
ability, feasibility, viability, and
adaptability of a business idea.
Expected Return
How lucrative a business idea
could be for the company if it
turned out to be successful.
Death & Disruption Risk
The risk that a business is
going to die or get disrupted.
Risk is high when a business
is either emerging and still
vulnerable, or when a business
is under threat of disruption
from technology, competition,
regulatory changes, or other
trends. Risk decreases with the
moats protecting your business.
Return
How lucrative a business area
is for the company.
Creating a portfolio of innovation projects
Portfolio existing assets
(GROWTH & SCALABILITY)
Portfolio of innovative projects
(RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT)

Replicable models for business innovation
140
Invent
Patterns
Greenfield
Pattern
Case Illustration
142
Frontstage Disruption
162
Backstage Disruption
188
Profit Formula Disruption

Companies that nurture an innovation culture

Outcomes
The concrete positive or negative conse-
quences resulting from people’s behavior.
Behaviors
How do individual and teams act or conduct
themselves within the company? What do
they do or say? How do they interact?
What patterns do you notice?
Enablers/Blockers
The levers that lead to positive or negative
behaviors inside your company. These could
be formal policies, processes, and reward
systems, or informal rituals and actions that
influence people’s behaviors and, ultimately,
influence a company’s outcomes.
DAVE GRAY
Author and entrepreneur
“If you want to understand
culture, you need to map it.”
DEFINITION
The Culture Map
Together with Dave Gray, Strategyzer developed
the Culture Map as a tool to design better-
performing companies. The Culture Map is a
practical, simple, and visual tool to understand,
design, test, and manage the corporate culture
you want to bring to fruition in your organization.
In this book we use the Culture Map to map
and design an innovation culture.
296
CULTURE
296
The Culture Map
Outcomes
Beta
Behaviors
Enablers/Blockers
: Strategyzer AG & Dave Gray, 2015
The makers of Business Model Generation and Strategyzer
:
davegrayinfo.com strategyzer.com
A Change Management Tool
Designed by: Date: Iteration:
Designed for:
297
CULTURE
Culture is eating strategy for breakfast
Peter Drucker

Try it. Test it. Try it again.

Designing businesses in Beta

55 business model patterns

Navigating business model patterns

Business cases and relevant industries

A prototype is an early representation of an idea-solution, in which specific elements are
visualised in order to get useful input during the design process.
Prototyping means acting before you’ve got all the answers, testing and exploring an idea,
probably stumbling a little, but then getting it right.
• Make mistakes – and discoveries – early
• Avoid wasting time on the wrong things
• Reduce risk of failure later on
• Take complex projects and make progress even when the challenges seem insurmountable
Why prototyping

vs
Perfection doesn’t pay off

Contacts:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincenzodimaria/
http://www.vincenzodimaria.com/
http://commongroundpeople.com/
https://www.uxuedizioni.it/book/start-small/
Resources:
Invicible Company https://www.strategyzer.com/books/the-invincible-company
Test business ideas https://www.strategyzer.com/books/testing-business-ideas-david-j-bland
Business model navigator https://businessmodelnavigator.com/
Keep learning. Keep in touch.

Prototyping Business Ideas

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