164 PrototyPIng desIgn 164 Design Attitude As businesspeople, when we see a prototype we tend to focus on its physical form or its representation, viewing it as something that models, or encapsulates the essence of, what we eventually intend to do. We perceive a prototype as something that simply needs to be refi ned. In the design profession, prototypes do play a role in pre-implementation visualization and testing. But they also play another very important role: that of a tool of inquiry. In this sense they serve as thinking aids for exploring new possibilities. They help us develop a better understanding of what could be. This same design attitude can be applied to business model innovation. By making a prototype of a business model we can explore particular aspects of an idea: novel Revenue Streams, for example. Participants learn about the elements of a prototype as they construct and discuss it. As previously discussed , business model prototypes vary in terms of scale and level of refi nement. We believe it is important to think through a number of basic business model possibilities before developing a business case for a specifi c model. This spirit of inquiry is called design attitude, because it is so central to the design professions, as Professor Boland discovered. The attributes of design attitude include a willingness to explore crude ideas, rapidly discard them, then take the time to exam- ine multiple possibilities before choosing to refi ne a few—and accepting uncertainty until a design direction matures. These things don’t come naturally to businesspeople, but they are requirements for generating new business models. Design attitude demands changing one’s orienta- tion from making decisions to creating options from which to choose. “If you freeze an idea too quickly, you fall in love with it. If you refi ne it too quickly, you become attached to it and it becomes very hard to keep exploring, to keep looking for better. The crudeness of the early models in particular is very deliberate.” Jim Glymph, Gehry Partners bmgen_final.indd 164 6/15/10 5:43 PM