Josh Petersen writes, in a comment titled Inside the design factory to Erik Benson’s post manufacturing innovation (citing Donald Reinertsen’s book Managing the Design Factory):
[W]hen [a new innovation] is built, all the information you needed is present (embodied in the innovation) and you can start to measure its present economic value. But when the innovation is just in the idea phase, you need to know how you can pull information that will only be present in the future more and more into the present. An example of how you do this is building prototypes. You also need to measure the economic cost of the development process itself, so you know whether you ought to “ship the prototype”, through [throw?] more resources at a project, or how to trade off one project against another.