Even Sushi Needs A Prototype Before Delivering!
Making sushi for the first time can be an adventure. Perhaps you have eaten sushi many times, but never have made it. If required to make sushi, what would be the kind of recipe you would choose? Most likely, you would search the web and learn the basic steps like the following:
How to Make Sushi
Ingredients :
- One container of rice = 175g
- Sushi vinegar (18g vinegar, 20g sugar, 2.5g salt)
Directions for Preparation:
- Cook rice until slightly hard
- Add and mix in vinegar, sugar, and salt in amounts proportionate to the rice.
- Mix ingredients by gently cutting vertical lines into the rice without mashing it together with the rice ladle and stirring. Repeat this process while letting the rice cool.
- Wrap ingredients in nori or create nigirizushi, a hand-formed sushi made of rice with a topping of seafood, and serve."
Following the above recipe, you can make sushi, but you do not know if those who eat it will say, "I think this is good," or push it away. Afterward, make the recipe once more, repeating Steps 1, 2 or 3 pursuant to your judgement to make innovations, and the quicker and more often you repeat the preparation, the more delicious your sushi will become. This process is called "prototyping". You have prepared innovative examples of your sushi, received feedback, and can proceed with assurance. Unbiased feedback is of great value.
A husband might praise his wife's sushi even if it is horrid, due to his regard for his wife and his marriage. An unbiased participant, however, will be more forthright in his feedback and therefore more helpful in the recipe's innovations. Japan's upscale sushi restaurant chefs will use the expressions and attitudes of customers as feedback for their sushi. They then change contents and method of preparing the sushi. Japan's sushi is an art that values feedback. So it is in the world of business.
Business Prototypes
There have been many examples in the business world where the company's personnel in charge of development believe in the excellence of a product, and proceed without receiving feedback. The company which then created it ended up with a mountain of unsold inventory.
Mobile games first employ a research and development team that is similar to the heavy duty development of new models of automobiles. No method is bypassed in either industry as the company researches possibilities, prepares innovative prototypes for exposure to a selected audience, and analyzes the feedback received. Sample game prototypes are distributed to sample audience persons for their use and feedback services. In the automotive industry, prototypes of new automobiles are provided to experts in the car and track world for their evaluations and survey feedback.
Even the military employs prototypes for their research and development teams to assure any new innovation is going to be a strong product and receive positive feedback to iron out any problems and assure the production of a top product. Commercial kitchens offer prototypes of new dishes to sample customers long before the finished product is at last sold to the public. Perhaps no business endeavor uses prototype analysis and sample feedback more than the toy industry. Entire laboratories are dedicated to displaying new toy items for children to a sampling of the target aged children, who are then recorded playing with the toy items and any commented feedback is registered.
Industrial Security for Prototype Innovations
In the industrial world, prototype innovations are considered top secret and guarded zealously from competitors, to protect their months of research and development work. In the military world, it has always been a source for spying and seeking the innovations of other countries. These examples are to demonstrate strenuously the value of innovations, prototypes and feedback in every aspect of our world. To ignore these three golden eggs is to subject your own product to certain failure.
Summary
The important thing is to receive feedback in the early stages. Consider prototyping to re-make the product several times, constituting product development or product innovation, turning the product into something with value. Not prototyping your innovation in the market place is like not tasting your sushi recipe before serving it.
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