Case Study: Planning A Restaurant Prototype

Learning Objectives:

• Compare broad and narrow assumptions about innovation concepts
• Analyze user feedback for opportunities to prototype

In the early 2010s, the American pizza chain Bertucci’s recognized that it was struggling with young-adult diners, who associated the brand with their childhoods. Generally speaking, they would visit the restaurant with their parents, but not with their friends. Let’s explore the scenario in more detail.

Bertucci’s is an American restaurant chain specializing in pizza and Italian cuisine, primarily concentrated in New England. While the chain was successful in the late 20th century, by the early 2010s, it struggled to attract young adult diners—a growing market at the time.

To address this challenge, Bertucci’s partnered with Continuum, a Boston-based global design firm. Continuum began by conducting interviews and observing target users, even accompanying them to restaurants to study their orders and behaviors. The research revealed that young adults preferred dining experiences that were genuine, social, and inviting.

Crucially, young adults associated Bertucci’s with their childhoods, viewing it as a place to dine with their parents rather than a spot to socialize with friends. This insight shifted the focus from adapting existing restaurants to creating a new brand built on Bertucci’s strengths.

The new concept leveraged Bertucci’s core competency: its brick ovens. The concept featured two ovens—a high-temperature oven for pizzas and a second oven for lower-temperature items like burgers and vegetables. The result was a new brand, aptly named Two Ovens.

How would you evaluate the 2Ovens concept in terms of the near-far-sweet model? Is the concept closer to the near or far end of the spectrum?

While establishing a new brand is a challenging task, the 2Ovens concept is based on Bertucci’s core competencies (brick-oven pizza and sit-down dining), so it is “near” the existing situation. The organization already has the resources and capabilities to plan and run a restaurant, and the concept will be similar to existing dining models.

When you are confident in the scope of an innovation concept, the impact-difficulty matrix (and thus the near-far-sweet model) can help you understand the level of detail that your initial prototypes may require.

• “Far” concepts: The goal is likely to test broader assumptions about desirability, feasibility, and viability. Questions to ask yourself include: Will the technology work? Is there really a need for the concept? Does the infrastructure exist to sustain it?
• “Near” concepts: With a solid base in the existing situation, experiments will likely test more detail-oriented assumptions. For the 2Ovens concept, for example, designers might proceed immediately to testing the feasibility of the layout and cook/server workflows.

Importantly, there are numerous assumptions to test even at the more detailed level, and you can prototype and iterate on them just as rapidly.

Even with limited information, numerous assumptions can be identified behind the Two Ovens concept. For instance:

• Workflow: Will the workflow for cooks and servers run smoothly with two ovens?
• Visibility: Will customers be able to see their food being prepared?
• Seating: Will the seating arrangement be flexible and adaptable to the communal dining experience?
• Payments: Will digital payment options streamline the end-of-service experience?

These are just a few critical questions that may have been raised during development. To address these, the design team at Continuum Innovation pursued the shortest path to testing the concept by building a full-scale model of the restaurant interior in a warehouse. Using lightweight foam board, they created movable representations of the ovens, tables, and seating, allowing for quick adjustments.

Within this prototype, the team could simulate service scenarios, testing how people moved through the space and interacted with the setup. This efficient market research and rapid prototyping enabled Two Ovens to transition from concept to a functioning restaurant in just 10 months. The first location exceeded revenue expectations.

This warehouse prototype is an excellent example of rapid prototyping principles:

1. Shortest Path to the Experience: It provided a realistic, testable setup quickly.

2. Doing Is the Best Kind of Thinking: Hands-on experimentation revealed insights that planning alone could not.

3. Speed of Thought: Lightweight, adaptable materials allowed for rapid iteration.

Prototypes are not limited to physical products. Services, models, and strategies can also benefit from rapid testing to address assumptions and achieve better innovation outcomes.

Building a foam-board prototype in a warehouse allowed Bertucci’s and Continuum to adopt the three principles of prototyping:

Regardless of where you are in the process of concept development—whether you are imagining brand-new technology, or slightly changing the existing situation to delight customers—you can create prototypes quickly to verify the user focus of the design.

Imagine that after the 2Ovens concept launched, a few negative reviews began to appear among the positive ones online. Consider these hypothetical examples:

• “Food and service were great, but my partner and I felt too close to everyone else. There are so many tables, and when you’re in a rush you don’t always want the ‘communal’ experience. Especially when there are kids at your table!”
• “This place is so noisy, and I guess that’s related to the ‘industrial’ architecture. On the plus side, it’s incredibly clean and the staff is so upbeat!”
• “I ate here, and it was so loud, it was like eating at a rock concert. The pizza is excellent, but there was a long wait for the food, and it was a little colder than I’d like.”

The following are some possible critical questions and rapid prototypes:

• Critical question: Will diners enjoy conversing in a loud environment with design choices that amplify sound?
  • Rapid prototype: Sound-dampening materials like inexpensive foam are quickly applied to the walls to compare how diners enjoy the experience with and without them.
• Critical question: Do diners prefer the same dining experience at lunch and dinner?
  • Rapid prototype: Use seating that can be easily rearranged between services to test different flows and table setups depending on the time of day.