It’s apples vs oranges.

According to Bryan Bauw: There are a few books out there on innovations and the assumptions you have to make. This article does great job summarizing the Minimum Viable Product v Prototype discussion.

It’ll never be perfect but just know most of us “”need to get better at shutting things down and moving on to the next good idea.” Using prototypes and MVPs in the right way helps companies do just that.”

A prototype is the outcome of an invention, whereas an MVP is a product that a customer would pay for? Both are critical to the product development process.

Prototypes enable removing the kinks in the product/solution before the customer interacts with it. Since it is is one of a kind, costs related to prototype build should be properly assessed in the product development cycle. Also since 80% of the cost related to new product development is determined in building prototypes, it is important to get this correct and fast, else we end with what is termed as prototype purgatory, an allegory to Dante’s vision of hell. With Additive manufacturing techniques like 3D printing, the process of prototyping can be greatly optimized to enable correct design and feasIblity.

MVPs though should follow a cadence of progression aka a master plan with every subsequent revision adding to existing features (or in most cases unlocking them) so that the customers are always excited about the new features that are unveiled. An example of this would be Tesla’s online firmware updates that fix bugs and add existing features to the cars auto driving capabilities. Of course, sometime this would need hardware updates as in case of Tesla when it moved from AP0 to AP1 (Mobileye) to AP2 (NVidia) to AP3 (it’s own full self driving GPU chip). But in each instance, there was a magnitude upgrade to functions and features.

Numorpho Cybernetic Systems (NUMO)’s MANTHAN Design Innovation framework (check link in comment) facilitates such a progression and if correctly implemented will enable companies to retain customers and also have them be the advocate to market the company’s brand.NI+IN UCHIL Founder, CEO & Technical Evangelist

nitin.uchil@numorpho.com