Ken Rother is the managing director of Cornell’s eLab student accelerator program and teaches entrepreneurship at the Johnson School. He is also the director of the business incubator and event space Rev: Ithaca Startup Works and directs its Hardware Entrepreneurship program. Ken is a venture partner at Cayuga Venture Fund and has held multiple senior business and technical positions for organizations such as Discovery Communications, Reuters, Matrox, and the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Building and Validating Prototypes
COURSE OVERVIEW
In this course, you will refine an idea for a physical product by focusing on the customer. Using the Business Model Canvas, you will list your initial assumptions about all aspects of product development, from value propositions to pricing. You will then create a low-cost consumer product prototype and validate it through customer discovery.
You will develop a business model for that product using the Business Model Canvas, then build and test prototypes to gain actionable customer feedback. By the end of the course, you will have discovered the types of companies that can help you prototype.
Please note that time to build the physical product prototypes will add about 1.5 hours to the time spent on the course.
This course requires the purchase of a low-cost physical product kit.
- Draft a Business Model Canvas for your product
- Write interview questions to validate your customers' problems or needs
- Create a "looks-like" prototype to validate your hypotheses
- Interview customers with your prototypes
- Fine-tune the Business Model Canvas

How It Works
Course Author
Who Should Enroll
- Entrepreneurs
- Product managers
- Designers
- Usability experts
- Software engineers
- Consultants
- Manufacturers
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