Multimedia Prototyping for Early-Stage Startups Endurance: Stage for New Normal?

Multimedia prototypes of varying degrees of fidelity and interactivity could be a powerful tool for early stage startups to validate their business model assumptions especially product value proposition. This grounds on the prototype's ability to enhance user experience (UX) thereby making their feedback more accurate and reliable. This article reports practical experiences with consultancy projects involving European early stage startups focusing on the cocreation process of value proposition innovation amid pandemic. This includes the challenges faced in interacting with onsite customers, multimedia prototyping as a tool to foster remote customer involvement, and different challenges involved in prototype-driven cocreation like intellectual property rights, federal laws, motivation rewards, tool selection, and balancing customer expectations. The involvement of remote customers is fostered by the combination of varying degrees of fidelity and interactivity. Higher fidelity and interactivity prototypes are more applicable when a startup has a continuously increasing customer base, better market understanding, and customers having better product understanding. The practical experience indicates that resource-constrained startups could be greatly benefitted from the adoption of multimedia prototyping in their market research. The multimedia prototype development technologies could be easily adopted in startup business practices owing to zero purchase cost, ease of use, and usefulness. Their adoption is expected to become a norm for the “new normal” as the role of multimedia prototypes is trivial for lean startups enhancing the value of design thinking as well as customer development processes. However, there is an urgent need to define a systematic process for the selection of prototype development tools meeting the business needs and their seamless integration in startup business practices, thereby leveraging across the wider spectrum of prototyping tools market.