Prototype-driven management

 What does successful corporate and governmental management have to do with the design of Boeing’s 787 “Dreamliner" ?

 It all has to do with modeling and prototypes. Paul Schimpf at Washington State University and Hesheng Liu, Martinos Biomedical Imaging Center, describes prototypes as the key to understanding all creativity and innovation. "Virtually every significant marketplace innovation of this century is the direct result of extensive prototyping and simulation" . "Consider, the airplane, the animated motion picture, the transistor, the microprocessor, the personal computer, the software spreadsheet, recombinant DNA biotechnology, the Internet and its World Wide Web, financial derivatives, and synthetic securities, and index funds and yield management."

The engines that drive innovation and performance

Why do models make the difference? Wherever you look for the fundamental dynamics driving innovation, you find innovators managing models - and the essential means is massively integrated computer modeling. By shifting from physical clay to virtual clay, every major automobile company has radically reengineered its design and production process. Boeing’s breakthrough 777 jet was built around the breakthrough digital prototypes. Walt Disney can’t produce feature-length animations without storyboards. Microsoft could not enjoy the market share and margins it does without its strategic deployment of beta-version software.

How the world’s best companies are creating value through advanced prototyping

Today, the Boeing Dreamliner example demonstrates that organizations create value best through visionary planning that, like the brain itself, places prototyping right up front. Boeing 787’s predecessor, the Boeing 777 was the first commercial aircraft to be designed entirely on computer. All design drawings were created on a 3D CAD software system known as CATIA, sourced from Dassault Systemes and IBM. This allowed a virtual 777 to be assembled, in simulation, to check for interferences and to verify proper fit of the many thousands of parts, thus reducing costly rework. Boeing was initially not convinced of the program's abilities and built a physical mock-up of the nose section to verify the results. The test was so successful that all further mock-ups were canceled. The rapidly evolving prototype of the 777 “floating” inside the interactive 3D world of CATIA, was arguably the most widely and completely shared mental space of all time— it was a great worldwide, digitally mediated “mind-meld” involving thousands of 777 stakeholders—the ultimate in innovative means strategies. According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Michael Schrage, prototype-driven management provide governmental bodies and companies with socially shared mental spaces that guide and amplify the efforts of their innovation. As world competition becomes tighter and tighter both governments and companies are being forced to operate in accordance with progressively higher and higher levels of human capacities for organizing and planning. "Prototypes and Ends policies are the key to success Michael Schrage says. "First in the creation of ideas and then in turning those ideas into value- producing products" Extracts from the article "Sky-High Innovation in the Boardroom"  The Public Sector Innovation Journal, Volume 11(2), article 5 by Larry Vandervert  Researcher in psychology and the neurosciences.

To help design the 787 Dreamliner Boeing used a fully immersive mixed-reality studio. The tools needed for this work include technology developed by companies such as EON Reality. EON Reality is at the forefront of developing visualisation systems that allow data from real and virtual objects to be combined, creating virtual prototypes in ‘immersive’ studios with a high degree of detail. With these systems, firms and their customers can experience products and services before they are produced in reality. 

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