"The culture of an organization has a strong influence on the quality of the innovations that the organization can produce." (Schrage, 1996)
This observation is drawn mainly from product-related organizations, but also applies to software development. There are primarily two kinds of organizational culture for innovation; the specification culture and the prototyping culture. In the format, new products and development are driven by written specifications. i.e., by a collection of documented requirements. In the latter, understanding requirements and developing the new product are driven by prototyping. Large companies such as IBM or AT&T that have to gather and coordinate a large amount of information tend to be specification-driven. Both approaches have pitential disadvantages. A carefully prepared specification may prove completely infeasible once prototyping begins. Similarly, a wonderful prototype may prove to be too expensive to produce on a large scale.
The medium used for developing the prototype affects the process itself. Schrage puts forward the example of General Motors, which used to produce clay prototypes of new cars and then try to capture these in CAD tools. On the other hand, Toyota designs its cars using CAD tools first and produces a clay prototype once the design has stabilized. The medium used also determines in part the questions that a prototype can answer. As a simple example, a horizontal software prototype will not be able to answer questions about the detailed operation of a function since it is not designed to model that level of detail.
The speed of prototype development and the time between prototyping iterations is often a product or organizational culture and tradition. Some companies have a set number of prototypes embodied in their development method and use this number irrespective of the technical needs of any particular product. Generally speaking, the more prototyping cycles there are, the more polished the final product will be.
The corporate prototyping cluture is most starkly revealed by who is involved in the prototyping and when. For example, who owns the prototype? Is there a special prototyping department? Who gets to see and evaluate the prototype? Sometimes designers are happy to show emerging prototypes to their peers but not to managers, for fear of being misunderstood and either having the project cancelled or finding an order to ship the prototype when it is not ready. Prototype demonstrations to senior managers often happen too late in the development cycle to have any real impact because of these fears.
David Kelly (Schrage, p. 195) claims that organizations wanting to be innovative need to move to a prototype-driven culture. Schrage sees that there are two cultural aspects to this shift. First, scheduled prototyping cycles that force designers to build many prototypes are more likely to lead to a prototype-driven culture than allowing designers to produce ad hoc prototypes when they think it is appropriate. Second, rather than innovative teams being needed for innovative prototypes, it is now recognized that innovative prototypes lead to innovating teams. This can be especially significant when the teams are cross-functional, i.e., multidisciplinary.
Excerpt taken from Preece, Rogers and Sharp, Interaction Design, beyond Human Computer Interaction, Wiley, 2002.
Reference: Schrage, "Cultures of Prototyping" in T. Winograd (ed.) Bringing Design to Software, Addison Wesley, 1996.