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You can give any hunch the structure of a problem and make that problem tangible. Innovations are not prescribed, but rather emerge from what you do in the process of trying to understand and tame a real-world problem—that is, prototyping a problem. Get ready to be wrong, because a good solution can emerge from being wrong a lot and you need only be approximately right once. This process of prototyping a problem as an approach to innovation has several advantages: progress is about how much you learn about the problem; there are multiple strategies for making your problem tangible and getting to specific questions; and there is a demonstration possible of any problem at a scale that matches your current resources.

You can get started innovating right away: just assemble some parts you already have or can get easily; learn as you go; and use those parts to make your problem tangible. Anything can be a part: in a corporate setting, that includes anything you currently do, assemble, or procure; and for everything else—from physical parts to services to resources for acquiring knowledge—there’s the Web. You bring parts together you’ve chosen so you can make any aspect of your problem tangible—even a solution—and you ask questions, reasoning about your problem with your minds and your hands. Parts will tell you what you need to assume at your current scale, what you aren’t seeing, what you are missing, and whether the next scale is even possible.

Organizations don’t just grown on their own. You build them, and you may end up building multiple organizations, each one atop the previous one. The scale-up logic is straightforward: You present what you did (the past) to motivate where you will go (the future), but what you work on is the middle (the present). Most emerging organizations fail because they build for the future having ignored the entire present. But you don’t have to worry about whether a decision is optimal for that rosy future—it just needs to work today. As you build the next organization, you’ll reuse parts from the old one and you’ll get to implement everything you’ve learned. Growth and scale-up work like problem solving: no one cares how you first came up with the solution. The organization that systematizes your current innovation prototype is your first big milestone.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the philosophy and then definition of the RITE method. It then delves into the benefits of this method and provides practical notes on running RITE tests effectively. The chapter concludes with an overview of the original case study behind the 2002 article documenting this method.