The navigator's question
"What is the absolute fastest, cheapest way we can test our riskiest assumption this week?" — instead of six months and a large budget on an unproven bet.
Innovation NavigatorStrategic Game
Low-Fidelity Testing
perfecting mockups→learning from roughness
The Goal
Validate strategic choices cheaply and rapidly before committing major resources.
Ideal For
Teams launching new products or entering unknown markets.
The Shift
From perfecting mockups to learning from roughness.
The Neuroscience
Crude sketches guard against sunk-cost bias and premature emotional attachment — the rougher the artifact, the easier it is to treat it as an experiment rather than an identity, keeping the mindset malleable for iteration.
The techniques, and why they work
Low fidelity on purpose
Paper prototypes and "Wizard of Oz" mock-ups answer strategic questions before anything is built. Roughness is a feature: it invites honest reactions and costs nothing to discard.
Validated learning, not finished product
The output of a prototype is knowledge. Build knowledge through small, smart experiments before the big capital bets.
Selected research
- Ries, E. (2011). The Lean Startup. Crown Business.
From the research
The thinking behind this lab, published in full: