In Part 1, you learned the What, Why, and How of 5 popular Innovation Frameworks – Human-Centered Design (also known as Design Thinking), Systemic Design, User-Centered Design, Lean Start-up, and Agile.
But as anyone who grew up in the 1980s and watched G.I. Joe will tell you, knowing is half the battle.
The other half is doing. More specifically, doing the right thing at the right time.
This brings us to Part 2 – the When of our 5 Innovation frameworks.
The Innovation Process
Before we get into the specifics of when to use each framework, let’s get clear on the activities that need to happen and the order in which they need to happen. In other words, we need to define an Innovation Process.
I know that sounds like an oxymoron. After all, you know that innovation is not a linear process. At best, it’s iterative. Usually, it looks and feels like this:
But you also know that this image doesn’t inspire confidence in senior leaders because it looks like chaos and doesn’t haven’t a timescale.
So to make the process more palatable to the powers that be, the Innovation Process is often shown as linear. Something like this:
Of course, that means that we, the innovators, must explain that the work isn’t, it’s an infinite loop with exit points at each step, and not every project can or should complete all the steps. It’s not perfect, but it serves its purpose (reassure senior leaders that we have a plan), so we’ll use it to help guide us to when to use each Innovation Framework.
Frameworks in the process
Now that we know the basic order in which activities should occur, we can return to our frameworks to determine which ones will best serve us in each step of the process.
“But wait!” some of you may exclaim. “Can’t we use them all?”
You can, but you don’t need to. Human-Centered Design and User-Centered Design are incredibly similar, and trying to use them both is more likely to confuse than clarify the work to be done.
“I knew it!” others will laugh, “that’s why I only use (fill in the framework).”
You can, but you shouldn’t. Every innovation has its strengths and weaknesses. The most successful innovators pull the best approaches and tools from each framework into their process.
Here’s how I think things fit together:
How to Interpret: The thicker the colored band in a column, the better suited the Innovation Framework is for the phase in the process. For example, Human-Centered Design is excellent for Diagnose, Design, and Develop phases, useful in De-Risk, and ok in Deliver. In contrast, Agile is not at all suited for Diagnose and Design but is excellent for De-Risk and Deliver.
In Diagnose and Design, lean heavily on Human-Centered Design because it keeps you open to all the types of people involved in the problem and the solution (not just users). If you’re operating in a complex environment, like healthcare or education, being in Systemic Thinking to make sure you don’t miss non-human elements like regulation, technology, or geopolitical dynamics that could also have a significant effect on the problem and eventual solution
In Develop, start weaving in elements of Lean Startup, especially its focus on building business models and not just individual products or services. Tools like the Business Model Canvas are a huge help here and reveal critical but non-product/service assumptions that need to be tested.
In De-Risk, Lean Startup and Agile become (relatively) interchangeable, so use the language that best resonates within your organization. The key here is to apply the Scientific Method to your solution through rapid prototyping and testing.
In Deliver, you’ve launched your solution, and the goal is to scale. Agile is designed for this, but it’s essential to keep the human/user at the center of continuous improvement efforts.
Popular “Innovation” Frameworks: Now What?
You’re now even more of an expert on five popular innovation frameworks, ready to talk the talk and walk the walk with the best of ’em. Right?
Maybe.
This is all the opinion of one person in a world of experts who think and who do. So what did I miss? What did I get wrong? Drop a comment, and you’ll make us all smarter!
Click here to automatically download the What, Why, How, and When Cheat Sheet
Forget secret handshakes, guarded rituals, and clandestine meetings. The easiest way to show that you’re a part of the “In-Crowd” is by throwing around obscure terms and incomprehensible acronyms.
Every industry has words and acronyms that only make sense to insiders. Stock traders have BOP (Balance of Power), Consumer Goods companies have ACV (All Commodities Volume), and, thanks to the military, we all have SNAFU (Situation Normal: All F-cked Up)
Innovators are no different. We throw around terms like Design Thinking, Lean Startup, ethnography, Discovery Driven Planning. We rattle off acronyms like VUCA JTBD, and MVP.
But do we really know what the industry terms and acronyms mean?
More importantly, are we sure that our definition is the same as our boss’ or colleague’s definition?
If you’re even a little bit like me, your answer to both of those questions is No.
And that feels awkward because it can lead to confusion, frustration, and disappointment in your work and your team.
So, let’s get back on the path to building clarity, efficiency, and support in your innovation efforts!
In Part 1, we’ll get into the What, Why, and How of the 5 of the most popular Innovation frameworks. Next week, in Part 2, we’ll dig into the When of each framework in the innovation process.
Popular “Innovation” Frameworks: What, Why, and How
What it is: A problem-solving framework that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success grounded in 3 principles:
Inspiration: Understand customer needs
Ideation: Generate creative ideas
Iteration: Rapidly prototype and test
Why it is important: Useful in solving “wicked problems,” problems that are ill-defined or tricky and for which pre-existing rules and domain knowledge will be of limited or no help (or potentially detrimental)
How you do it:
Qualitative research with tools like ethnography and Jobs to be Done to build empathy with the customer
Ideation to identify and explore lots of possible solutions
What it is: A way of making sense of the world’s complexity by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into its parts; grounded in 5 principles:
Acknowledge the interrelatedness of problems
Develop empathy with the system
Strengthen human relationships to enable creativity and learning
Influence mental models to facilitate change
Adopt an evolutionary design approach to desired systemic change.
Why it is important: The increased complexity caused by globalization, migration, sustainability renders traditional design methods insufficient and increases the risk that designs result in unintended side effects.
How you do it:This is an emerging innovation discipline with multiple schools of thought and dozens of potential tools. To learn more and find tools, check out the Systemic Design Association.
What it is: A framework in which usability goals, user characteristics, environment, tasks, and workflow of a product, service, or process are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process and grounded in 6 principles
Design is based upon an explicit understanding of users, tasks and environments.
Users are involved throughout design and development.
Design is driven and refined by user-centered evaluation.
Process is iterative.
Design addresses the whole user experience.
Design team includes multidisciplinary skills and perspectives.
Why it is important: Optimizes the product around how users can, want, or need to use it so that users are not forced to change their behaviors and expectations to accommodate the product.
How you do it:Personas, scenarios, and use cases that capture the context, behaviors, habits, and instincts with
What it is: A methodology for developing businesses and products that emphasizes customer feedback over intuition and flexibility over planning, grounded in 5 principles:
Entrepreneurs are everywhere.
Entrepreneurship is management.
Validated learning.
Innovation Accounting.
Build-Measure-Learn
Why it is important: Aims to shorten product development cycles and rapidly discover if a proposed business model is viable
What it is: A project management philosophy that expanded to be used in innovation and business transformation
Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools
Working Software Over Comprehensive Documentation
Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation
Responding to Change Over Following a Plan
Why it is important: Improves time to market, quality, and employee morale
How you do it:The most common tools are:
Agile teams that are small, entrepreneurial, and empowered groups
Operating Model with focuses on leadership and culture, management systems, structures, talent, and processes
So What?
By now, you’ve probably noticed that the frameworks above are very similar – many of them are centered on the customer, value diverse experience expertise when creating solutions, and prioritize iteration over perfection.
So, which should you use?
The answer to that question depends on two things: your company and where you are in the innovation process. We’ll dive into those topics next week.
As you wait patiently for Part 2:
Tell me what I got wrong, what I missed, and what you think in the comments
Download this handy cheat sheet to the What, Why, and How of 5 Popular Innovation Frameworks
Before setting off on a journey to strange lands, most travelers take time to learn an essential phrase or two in the native tongue. After all, the ability to say “Hello” or “Help” or “Where’s the bathroom?” in the local language can mean the difference between a trip you remember forever and one that you want to forget immediately.
The same is true for people in large companies who set off on a quest to innovate – you’re in a strange land, and having a few handy phrases at the tip of your tongue can mean the difference between success and failure.
Here are the four most important phrases you should know as a corporate innovator
What does success look like?
Ask this at the beginning of every innovation effort. If you don’t, it’s very likely that what you view as success and what decision-makers view as success will be two different things.
Staffing up a new innovation team? What does success look like?
Starting a new project? What does success look like?
Developing and testing a prototype? What does success look like?
And don’t accept a vague or even qualitative answer to the question, like “we’ll know it when we see it” or “better employee engagement.” You need to know precisely what an effort contributes to and how leaders will evaluate the effort. Otherwise, it’s easy for managers to “move the goalposts” right when you think you’re about to score.
We expect a new innovation team to hold five brainstorming sessions and test 3 new products this year
We need this project to generate $10M revenue in 3 years from today
We need to understand how consumers will use this if we don’t give them any directions
Will you help me?
This question is perhaps the most challenging but most potent phrase in the innovation-to-corporate dictionary.
By the very nature of your work – making something new that creates value – you’re doing something that doesn’t fit cleanly into the existing structure. While that can be liberating, it also means that there are few, if any, people obligated to give you advice, resources, or support. That’s where this phrase comes in.
We all love to feel important and valued, and nothing makes people feel more important or valued than being asked for help. Plus, when you ask for help, people feel like they’re contributing to what you’re doing and start to feel a bit of ownership (or at least fondness) for it. Soon, you not only have advisors, but you also have partners, advocates, and champions.
Tell me more
This phrase is the ultimate innovation jiu-jitsu phrase because it turns your opponents’ strength (of opinion) against them and gives you powerful insights.
That will never work. Intriguing, tell me more.
We tried it, and it failed; the same thing will happen this time. I didn’t know that, tell me more.
If you do that, you’ll be fired. We don’t want that, so tell me more about why that would result.
Sometimes the rationale behind powerfully delivered dogmatic statements is logical and valid. Often, it’s emotional. The person who said it would never work is afraid that, if it does, their job will be in jeopardy. The person who remembers when it was tried before still bears the scars of that attempt and wants to protect you from the same experience. The person who says you’ll be fired for doing something may think that the rules are stricter than they are, and they’re trying to help you.
This phrase helps you figure out the reason behind the statement, the Why behind the What, so you can figure out what is true versus believed and how to get to your desired outcome.
What do you need to see to say “Yes”?
This question is my personal favorite, taught to me by a good friend, career innovator, and successful entrepreneur.
It is easy to say “No” and, in fact, that is the purpose of many people in a large organization.
Legal says No to keep the company o the right side of the law and out of lawsuits.
Accounting says No to keep the company financially healthy
Your boss says no because you have more work than you can handle, and this doesn’t seem essential.
Sometimes “No” is the correct answer. But if you start there, you’ll never know if it is the right answer or just the first, easiest, or most instinctual answer.
So, once you hear “No,” engage the person you’re talking to in a quick intellectual exercise and ask what they need to see to say “Yes.” By engaging them as an expert and your thought partner, you’re lowering their defenses and bringing them into a problem-solving mindset. Plus, you’re getting valuable insight into the type of data and evidence required to make progress.
What are other phrases every innovator should know?
As anyone who has ever tried to quickly learn a language for an extended trip, you’re best served by seeking out multiple sources.
After all, if I relied solely on Rosetta Stone to learn Danish before I moved to Copenhagen, I would have arrived knowing only how to say “the girl is on top of the airplane” (phonetically, it’s “pia pa flu-va-ma-skine”) and not “Hello” or “Help” or “Where’s the bathroom?”
So what are the phrases you repeatedly use to navigate your corporate innovation journey?
You know that to deliver today’s business and achieve tomorrow’s goals, you need a portfolio of projects that improve your existing operations and a portfolio of innovation projects. You also know that to max out your odds of hitting tomorrow’s goals, you need a portfolio of different types of innovation projects.
You are also keenly aware that with limited resources, you can’t possibly fund every project.
So how do you make some of the most complex decisions that confront leaders?
Don’t fall into the trap of false choices.
It’s easy to feel like you need to decide between funding operations projects and innovation efforts. You don’t.
Projects that improve what you do today, like increasing efficiency and improving existing offerings, are fundamentally different than innovation projects that create something new. Trying to compare them is like trying to compare strawberries and broccoli – they’re fundamentally different, and people have strong feelings about both.
Do allocate resources to improvement AND innovation projects.
Most of your resources should go to improvement projects because there are what keep you in business and equal to (or ahead of) competitors. They’re also the lowest risk, so you can be confident of achieving your expected ROI.
Innovation projects are higher risk, and the number of resources they need is hard to predict, especially when they are in their earliest days or focused on something radically new and breakthrough.
Don’t give innovation projects all their resources at once.
Annual budgets make sense when you’re 99.9999% certain that the line item will be around for an entire year. But when you don’t know if a project will be around until next quarter, let alone next year, don’t give them all the resources upfront. Project teams will be tempted to front-load their spending and, if the project needs to end, it can be hard to quickly free up the resources to allocate them to a different project.
Do protect all innovation resources for an entire year.
Even if you have the excellent discipline to carve out an annual budget for innovation and dole it out in bite-sized chunks based on hitting key milestones, it can be hard to maintain that discipline. Over time, the funds allocated to innovation, but not specific projects, start to look like a piggy bank that you can “borrow” money from when your existing business needs to. And while your intentions may be good, borrowed money is never repaid and, as a result, isn’t available when it’s needed.
Don’t use the same criteria to evaluate every innovation project.
Every project needs a small initial investment – money and people to answer a question or explore a space to see if “there’s a there there.” But before allocating a single additional resource to an innovation project, you should be able to answer the following five questions:
What is the problem we’re solving, and who has it?
How can/will we solve this problem?
Why should we solve this problem/create this solution (e.g., does this support our strategy and priorities or create a compelling and sustainable competitive advantage)?
What results do we need/will we get?
What is the next major milestone, and what is required to get there?
If these questions can’t be answered, more work needs to be done, or the effort must be canceled. But often, these questions can be answered, but additional resources aren’t allocated because they can’t be answered with the same depth, breadth, and certainty that later-stage innovation projects can.
Applying the same burden of proof to an early-stage project asking for $10,000 to conduct consumer research as you apply to a late-stage project asking for $10M to launch doesn’t protect you from making a mistake. It drains your innovation portfolio and “protects” you from growth.
Do evolve decision-making criteria as a project progresses and resource requests get bigger.
At every stage of its development, a project should be able to answer the five core questions above with increasing depth and greater confidence rooted in ever more concrete and quantifiable evidence.
For example, consider a project in the design phase (first draft of a solution) seeking a few thousand dollars to test a paper concept with customers. When asked, “What results do we need/will we get?” if the answer is “We believe we can generate $X revenue based on the following eight assumptions, all of which we find believable based on internal or external benchmarks.” If you agree, then give them the money.
When that same project reaches the De-Risk phase (in-market testing) and requests millions of dollars and dozens of people for launch, if the answer is the same, STOP everything immediately (and, honestly, it shouldn’t have gotten this far)! The answer in this phase should be a detailed P&L and NPV because you know more than you did back at Design, and you’re asking for more.
Resource allocation is complex, especially when you have limited resources and an abundance of very different but very attractive choices. But it can be easier with a bit of discipline and common sense.
What other tips and tricks do you use to make resources allocation decisions?
After months of work, haggling, encouraging, and deep breathing, you finally have your innovation capability up and running.
Your innovation strategy clearly aligns with and supports the overall business strategy. Teams know the boundaries within which they can innovate, understand the results they need to deliver and access the people and tools they need to make progress. Your leadership team regularly engages with innovation teams, talks with customers, and shares progress and learnings with the whole organization.
Your work here is done.
Right?
Wrong.
It’s just beginning.
Building a lasting capability for sustainable and repeatable innovation is a marathon, not a sprint. And while what you achieved is genuinely momentous, it’s also the equivalent of signing up for a marathon, putting on your shoes, and walking out your front door.
In short, you’ve just started training.
Training for a marathon
Full disclosure, I have never run a marathon, and I never intend to. Many years ago, a group of friends decided to run a marathon, and I volunteered to be their Team Manager and handle all travel and game day logistics. Long story short, I missed one of our re-fueling points because I took a nap in the car. Yes, I can’t even drive a marathon without getting tired.
So, to make sure this analogy holds, I sought training advice for beginners from Runner’s World. Here’s what I learned:
Training usually requires 16 to 20 weeks of running three to five times a week. That’s 48 to 100 training sessions to complete ONE marathon!
Beginners should focus on finishing the marathon, not their time to complete it. Remember, the first person to run a marathon died. Living to tell your tale is winning.
You will miss training sessions. If you don’t miss too many (4 weeks or more), you’ll be fine.
Training is hard. The key is distinguishing “good pain” from “bad pain.”
Strength training and conditioning are just as important as running is in your training program.
Training for lasting innovation
Full disclosure, I have done a lot of innovation as both an intrapreneur and a consultant. As a result, I can assure you that leaders of newly established innovation capabilities endure a training experience similar to marathoners’.
Stabilizing your innovation capability to be “the way we do business” takes significantly longer than establishing it. You will have to engage, encourage, advocate, remind, steer, and communicate 48-100 times more now than you had to in the past.
Organizations should focus on proving that they can successfully create, test, and launch a commercially viable innovation, not finding the next $1B idea. Remember, ideas are a dime a dozen, and the organization is burned out on innovation theater. Launching something that makes money proves that innovation is possible and that is winning.
You will have failures. If you take the time to learn from them, to find the root cause, and make changes, so they don’t happen again, you’ll be fine.
Innovation is hard because change and uncertainty are hard. The key is distinguishing “good pain” from bad pain. It’s called “growing pains,” not “growing tickles” for a reason.
Managing and growing your core business is just as crucial as stabilizing and encouraging innovation. You need to see the whole picture to make the best decisions to reach your short-term AND long-term goals.
What’s your innovation training regimen?
Being a leader is like being a runner – it’s an identity.
Being a leader that supports and enables innovation is like being a marathoner – people think you’re crazy to endure the pain and discipline of training, but they will never know the high that comes from achieving a seemingly impossible goal.
What did I miss in the list above? What’s your innovation training regimen?
The Great Resignation is real. At the start of 2021, 40% of employees thought about quitting. Between April and September, more than 24MM turned those thoughts into action.
You don’t want your people to be in either of those stats. You value them and their experience, so you work hard to ensure that the most common causes of attrition – poor wages and benefits, toxic culture, worries about job insecurity, and feeling unappreciated – are not issues in your business.
And you don’t stop there. You offer opportunities for professional development, and you’re investing more than ever in innovation.
But if you believe new research published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, your investment in innovation is causing your people to quit.
Are resignations the price you pay to be innovative?
According to the study’s authors, “high levels of innovation” is the third-highest predictor of attrition behind only toxic work culture and job insecurity and reorganization.
“In the Culture 500 sample, we found that the more positively employees talked about innovation in their company, the more likely they were to quit.”
They go on to explain that “Staying at the bleeding edge of innovation typically requires employees to put in longer hours, work at a faster pace, and endure more stress than they would in a slower-moving company. The work may be exciting and satisfying but also difficult to sustain in the long term.”
Ok, fair. But let’s dig a bit deeper.
The three most innovative companies in the Culture 500 (the dataset used for analysis) are Nvidia, Tesla, and SpaceX. At least two of those (Tesla and SpaceX) are infamous for their toxic work cultures, to the extent that lawsuits are pending against both.
That’s especially important because “Toxic Corporate Environment” is the #1 predictor of attribution in that it is “10.4x more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation.” The #2 predictor, “Job insecurity and reorganization,” is only 3.5x more likely to contribute to attrition, and innovation is 3.2x more likely.
Sure, the data says that innovation is a predictor of resignations. Still, I think the reality is that companies are using “innovation” as an excuse for their toxic work cultures. It is toxicity, not innovation, that is causing people to quit.
Resignations are the price you pay for pretending to be innovative
Far more common, at least in my experience, is that companies and leaders that engage in innovation theater are far more likely to lose people due to “innovation.”
Here’s how it plays out:
Innovation events give people hope. Hackathons, shark tanks, even ideation sessions create the impression that the company is serious about innovation. The company’s investment of time and resources into these events sends a message that it wants to hear employees’ ideas and is willing to invest in the good ones and see them through.
Innovation training gives people skills and changes their mindsets. Incubators, accelerators, and one-off trainings in topics like design thinking and lean startup teach employees how to innovate and give people the experience of innovating. Through that experience, people realize that they are creative, have good ideas, and can drive change. They begin to see what is possible and believe they can make it happen.
Everything goes back to “business as usual,” and people are left disappointed and disillusioned because the company wasn’t committed to anything beyond an event. People are also left newly aware of the possibilities and empowered to take advantage of them. They realize that the company is all talk when it comes to innovation, but they have the power to walk. And they do.
You’re doing the right things. Now keep doing them.
Your investments in professional development and innovation are spot on.
And, In the near term, they will lower attrition and help you attract phenomenal talent,
But if you want to keep your people for the long term, you need to keep investing in professional development and innovation.
Design hackathons and shark tanks with a plan for what happens after the event, how people will stay engaged, and how the company will continue to see and learn from the resulting projects.
Run incubators, accelerators, and trainings and give people permission to apply the methods and tools in their day jobs, reward them for using what they learned and teaching others, and hold managers accountable for supporting and encouraging these new behaviors and mindsets.
These are just a few ways you can be innovative AND retain your best people. I’m sure there are lots more.
