Business Prototyping And The Generic Business Model Prototype

An introduction to business prototyping

Oliver Grasl
Thursday, January 17, 2013

An introduction to business prototyping

Over the last 18 months or so we presented a number of webinars concerning business model prototyping. Next to introducing approaches to prototyping the different aspects of a business the ultimate goal of these webinars was to build and demonstrate a generic business model prototype using a System Dynamics approach.

The webinars were very well received by our listeners and this motivated us to bring the generic business model prototype online. Over the last months we have been working hard to bring the prototype into a form that can be presented on our blog – today we are proud to start a series of blog posts that will discuss the generic business model prototype in detail.

Building such a prototype is actually quite challenging because you need both a good understanding of business and also of the System Dynamics modeling language. To ensure all our readers can follow we have decided to keep individual posts short but to publish posts at a higher frequency than in the past. This approach will also give you the opportunity to raise questions and post comments that will help us to continuously improve the quality of our posts and of the generic business model prototype.

What Exactly is Business Prototyping?

A great part of this website is dedicated to business prototyping – a simple definition we use is:

Business prototyping is the art and science of experimenting with new business ideas and concepts in a risk free environment in order to explore the consequences of new designs and decisions before realizing them in practice.

Depending on the situation we choose the appropriate business prototyping technique: this includes quantitative, “hard” techniques such as visual models and simulations and qualitative, “soft” techniques such as game playing and storytelling.

See how to apply business model prototyping to professional service firms and play the Make Your PSF Grow game.
See whether you can Make Your PSF Grow.

The generic business model prototype was built using System Dynamics and the ®Stella modeling environment.

What Are The Objectives of The Business Model Prototype?

Create the simplest possible prototype of a „generic“ business: Easy to understand, yet still covers all aspects.
Learn how to model different aspects of a business: Deepen your understanding of both BUSINESS and of PROTOTYPING.
Use the prototype as a basis for modeling concrete business cases: The prototype can be used as a reference in specific situations.

This is all for today, in my next post I will discuss the The Business Model Concept.