When teams explore and iterate with five or more different ideas rather than selecting one or two ideas and moving them forward, they are 50% more likely to successfully launch.

When it comes to emerging technology, it’s often anyone’s guess what the future will hold. At IDEO U we are far from having a crystal ball and that’s why we advocate for “building to think” or, rather, making prototypes to learn how people react. To help get our heads around emerging tech, we invited our IDEO friends, IDEO CoLab, in for a Creative Confidence Series session about emerging tech (and why you should care).

In our Creative Confidence series chat with IDEO CoLab Co-Managing Director Joe Gerber, we explored the world of business prototyping. In his early days as a Business Designer at IDEO, Joe noticed that experimenting and prototyping were an essential part of IDEO’s process and became curious about prototyping something complicated and abstract like a business.

As Managing Director of IDEO CoLab, Matt Weiss is passionate about bringing design to emerging technologies early in their development. Matt and his team bring a human-centered design lens to new technology to better understand its functionality and help shape its formation.

We’re inspired by people who take action and learn by doing. Courageous doing is a theme for us at IDEO U and part of the definition of what it means to be creatively confident.

As IDEO Cambridge Portfolio Director, Katherine Londergan works with companies of all sizes to bring new innovations to life. Katherine shares with us how her team uses venture design to move from hypothesis, to testing and prototyping, to rapid iterations.

This inspiration is an excerpt from David and Tom Kelley’s book Creative Confidence. The post is about how the IDEO team generated a quick, low production prototype for Sesame Street to pitch the idea for the Elmo Monster Maker App. Rapid prototyping is a subject that we cover in our From Ideas to Action course.