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Amazon.co.uk Review
Schrage examines the approaches to successful prototyping at companies such as AT&T, Boeing, Microsoft and DaimlerChrysler and describes the kind of culture that's needed for encouraging innovation. In the last chapter, he lays out the 10 rules of serious play, including: be willing to fail early and often; know when the costs outweigh the benefits; know who wins and who loses from an innovation; build a prototype that engages customers, vendors and colleagues; create markets around prototypes; and simulate the customer experience. Well written and inspiring, Serious Play, is a first-rate user's guide for managers, project leaders and other innovators. --Dan Ring, Amazon.com
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As digital technologies for modeling and simulation offer more value for less money, they provoke fundamental challenges to organizational culture and design. MIT research associate Michael Schrage asserts that conventional wisdom surrounding innovation gets turned inside out: What innovative companies choose not to model often proves more important than what they do. Contrary to the popular assumption that innovative teams generate innovative prototypes, in fact innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. How innovators play with their models and simulations invariably matters far more than what they actually plan. In fact, Schrage shows why innovative firms cannot seriously plan unless they seriously play.
Drawing upon a range of companies as diverse as Walt Disney, Boeing, Merrill Lynch, General Electric, IBM, IDEO, Microsoft, Royal Dutch Shell, DaimlerChrysler and American Airlines, Schrage identifies the common patterns and practices that distinguish productive prototyping cultures from pathological ones. He explores the intimate connection between how leading innovators model reality and how they actually manage it. He examines prototyping failures as rigorously as he explains prototyping successes.
The essential message of Serious Play is that tomorrow's innovations will increasingly be the byproduct of how companies and their customers behave-and misbehave-around this new generation of models, prototypes, and simulations. The distinction between serious play and serious work dissolves as technology gives innovators ever-increasing opportunities to simulate and prototype their ideas. As the media for modeling radically change, so will the organizations that use them.
With real-world examples and engaging anecdotes, Schrage argues that the future of prototyping is the future of innovation. A User's Guide included in the book helps readers quickly take away the innovation practices profiled throughout. A landmark book by one of the most perceptive voices in the field of innovation, Serious Play will lay serious claim to the hearts and minds of forward-looking business managers.
We shape our models, and then our models shape us. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Subtitled "How the world's best companies simulate to innovate", Serious Play is about the kind of inspired innovation that can only be (relatively) safely achieved within a model or simulation. The classic example must be the Boeing 777. Nowadays, the tools are available and at negligible real cost, to enable modelling and simulation to be carried out at will, often, but, most of all, NOW!
The classic computer-based modelling medium is the software spreadsheet. This was the system to be seen with. Within five years of its invention by Dan Brinklin, a Harvard Business School student in 1979, VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet for personal computers, over one million spreadsheets were being sold annually.
As the cost of computing falls even faster than computer power and capacity grow, it is economically viable to 'waste' modelling time and iteration in search of innovation. Knowing where and when to pause for a moment (but never stop) is the real issue.
Bit while simulation should be a source of innovative surprise and increasing serendipity, it will also be the breeding ground of disruption and dissension. Modelling can and will produce results that are not only surprising but can be profoundly disturbing for those directly affected. It is still rare for managers enthusiastically to design themselves out of a job. Who owns the model (marketing, production, design or even the customer) matters as well as who benefits from the successful introduction of the resulting innovations. This will be test that separates the chic from the gauche in the 21st Century.
Models without metrics are meaningless. The most significant measurement, however, is not mean-time-to-market but customers' perceived mean-time-to-payback. The success of VisiCalc was due in largest measure to the perception that, including the cost of buying a PC and learning how to use the software, the payback time was less than two weeks. Therein lies the final message.
With endless iteration possible at near to nil cost, the 'model' for the development of models that "s(t)imulate to innovate" is more biological evolution rather than inorganic IT. Increasingly, innovation will evolve from the computer as the product of rapid iteration than as the step by step process of design.
In the Foreword, Tom Peters quotes Schrage's assertion that "Innovative prototypes generate innovative teams. Not vice versa." Peters then observes that, in Serious Play, the "big idea" is that "the prototyping process becomes the scaffolding" for an enterprise's approach to innovation. As Schrage explains, "I have always enjoyed rehearsals more than performances." I suggest that you keep that statement clearly in mind as you proceed through the book. It reveals much about Schrage's perspective on the correlations between prototypes and innovation.
Here is how the book is organized: Part I: Getting Real, Part II: Model Behavior, and Part III: S(t)imulating Innovation. Schrage then provides a User's Guide and Bibliography. Throughout the book, he shares a wealth of real-world experience which explains what innovation is, and, what it can help to accomplish, not only with the design of a new product or service but also with the formulation of new and better ways for people to work together. The key is simulation; moreover, "not just playing with representations of ideas" (lots of ideas, the more the better) but "playing with the various versions of representations of ideas."
Near the end of the final chapter, Schrage poses a number of critically important questions, suggesting that the "best hope for answering these questions, or coping with their implications, is to build or grow models and play with them seriously." The world's best companies simulate to innovate. For example: American Airlines, Boeing, DaimlerChrysler, General Electric, IBM, IDEO, Walt Disney, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, and Royal Dutch Shell. Schrage believes that the creative tensions between innovators who design and innovators who evolve "will likely result in breakthroughs in products, services, and their yet-to-be-anticipated hybrids." So, why not prototype how to prototype? Why not play simulation games which reveal new and better ways to simulate?
Tom Peters describes Serious Play as "simply the best book on innovation I've ever read." I agree. Perhaps you will, also.
I especially liked Schrage's recognition of spreadsheets as a simulation tool. In discussions on simulation, spreadsheets are usually ignored because they are seen as unsophisticated. Schrage shows how spreadsheet simulations made many of the financial innovations of the 80s and early 90s possible.
In addition to convincing readers that simulations are valuable, Schrage does a good job of introducing readers to how simulations can be implemented in business. The chapters near the end of the book on measuring the ROI of simulations and his brief user's guide provide some useful tools for those interested in using simulations and prototypes to improve decision-making.
This book will help engineers, designers and simulationists communicate the value of prototypes. Executives will understand some of the potential pitfalls of managing prototype-driven products. Pariticularly interesting are his points on how modeling affects behavior in an organization and how an organization must be prepared to handle innovative prototypes.
Simulationists looking for discussions including terms like "discrete-event," "systems dynamics," and "probability distribution" will want to look elsewhere. Schrage's examples, mostly from the world of spreadsheet financial models, physical product prototyping, and software development, deal with the organizational implications of innovative prototypes, not "how to" develop prototypes.
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