Innovation Frameworks: What Successful Companies Get Right (and Others Don't)

Welcome to Sprint Forward, your weekly innovation newsletter. Here, we provide no-frills insights, methods, and tools to debunk innovation and fast-track your journey.

In this second issue, we start exploring the topic of Innovation Frameworks, which we'll cover in three parts:

Part 1 - Understanding Innovation Frameworks: What exactly is an innovation framework?

Part 2 - The Importance of Having a Framework: Just why is it so important to have a an innovation framework?

Part 3 - Getting Started: Practical steps to develop and implement your own innovation framework.

This week, let’s dive into the first part:

What exactly is an innovation framework?

The sad reality is that most organizations don’t have an innovation framework. Of course, some think they do, but what they’re calling an innovation framework is nothing of the sort. Worse still, many don’t even think about it.

How can you tell if your organization is missing a true innovation framework? Look for these signs:

• … Your innovation pipeline lacks originality

• … Experiments are scarce to non-existent

• … Innovation efforts lack creativity with few new solutions emerging

• … The innovation team struggles with a lack of clear purpose and direction

• … Customer needs and insights aren't integrated into your innovation process.

• … Your team lacks the essential skills to create new concepts

• … Funding and resources necessary for innovation success are insufficient.

• … Measuring the business impact of innovation initiatives is a difficult.

If none of these issues resonate with your organization, then CONGRATULATIONS – You have done it. You have a sound innovation framework. Please reach out, as I am always eager to hear success stories. I am sure the other readers would love that too.

But if these signs are familiar in your company, it likely indicates the absence of an innovation framework. And now, having mentioned 'innovation framework' only about a hundred times, you might be wondering: WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?

Here we go:

While some innovation teams might also take on the building phase, this aspect can be wildly different across industries and organizational types. Therefore the innovation framework should focus the stages leading up to implementation-readiness.

To clarify, here are the stages any innovation framework should cover:

1. Discovery: Gathering customer insights, business intelligence, competitive data, industry trends, employees’ ideas, and other relevant information.

2. Problem Validation: Defining and prioritizing opportunities, aligning business objectives with customer needs, creating assumptions and setting KPIs.

3. Solution Validation: Ideation, creating prototypes, and testing these solutions with customers.

4. Live or Kill: Establishing criteria for advancing or discarding an idea, involving key business stakeholders.

5. Implementation Strategy: Developing a strategy for rolling out the validated solution such as product roadmaps, business models, etc.

6. Hand-Off to Execution: Transitioning the project to the execution team.

7. Measurement: Assessing success against predefined metrics like ROI, customer satisfaction, etc.

The specific stages of an innovation framework may vary across organizations, or even bear different names.

That’s OK.

So for each stage, you must clearly define:

• Expected outcomes and deliverables: Why is it necessary and what are we trying to achieve?

• Specific Process, Tools and Methods: needed to deliver the above outcomes. Basically here’s how we do things.

• Structure and Roles: determine who is needed and what roles they will play to implement the process effectively, so it will deliver the outcomes

• Skills and Motivations your team needs to execute the process successfully

If your organization already has an innovation framework, take a closer look at it. Check if the aspects mentioned above are well-documented and understood. Can every team member articulate the framework consistently? Can stakeholders outside the innovation team, like business partners, understand and describe it?

In our next issue, we'll look more into why having an innovation framework is so important. You might already be getting a sense of that, but for now, let's just say that:

That's it for today!