Innovation Best Practices – Online Processes, Tools & Templates for New Product, Service & Business Model Innovation

The 70-20-10 Rule is a strategy for determining how to allocate time and resources in order to make a successful innovation. Generally, the rule helps organizational stakeholders determine if they should make high risk/high reward innovations or improve upon existing products or services.Learn More »

Agile Innovation Process is a team-based methodology for constantly adapting to changing business circumstances and conditions. The overarching goal of agile innovation is to develop a product or service that changes the market, forcing competitors to adapt or exit as a market player. In order to accomplish this goal, agile innovation processes involve splitting up larger projects into simpler, more manageable tasks and continuously reassessing the strategies for completing them.Learn More »

Brainstorming is the creation and listing of ideas by one or more individuals in order to find a solution to a problem or generate ideas for a future business opportunity.  Also known as “Idea Generation” brainstorming is a common practice in marketing, innovation, design thinking, Six Sigma and other quality management processes.Learn More »

A Business Case clearly outlines the fundamental reason for why an organization should engage in a particular project or task. They can either be formally or informally presented to top-level management or other relevant stakeholders. Generally, the team creating the business case for a project or task should aim to argue that whatever resources (e.g., money, time, talent, etc.) need to be expended for a project are being requested in order to fulfill a business necessity.Learn More »

The Business Model Canvas is a template for developing a new business model or clarifying the elements of an existing business model. It is a “canvas” or chart that describes a firm’s value proposition, infrastructure, partnerships, value proposition, customers, finances and other strategic and operational dimensions of the business.

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Concept Development is the starting point for a business idea. It includes the type of service or product, the target customer demographic, and describes what is unique about it that will give this idea a competitive advantage. The process of Concept Development results in a portfolio of business concepts that can be prioritized and then used to develop a business plan.

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Concept Screening is a process that an organization can use to narrow down the number of ideas that are commonly generated for a new product or service. In order to ensure that the strongest ideas are selected for further development, they need to be screened against certain criteria.Learn More »

Concept Testing is the process of using surveys, interviews, or other means to test consumer acceptance of a new product idea prior to introducing a new product to the market.

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A Context Canvas is used to develop a deep sense of the environment in which a product or service is being created. Specifically, this tool can be used to guide thinking about what is happening in the organization and the broader world that might affect the business in the future.Learn More »

The chasm is the space between the vision of the innovative product or service and the early segment of the market that will purchase the product. Crossing the Chasm involves taking steps in order to reconcile the discrepancy between the visionaries’ desire to be cutting edge in order to attain a competitive advantage and the desire of the early market to have an improved version of an existing product or service.Learn More »

Crowdsourcing is a method for using an organization’s entire “crowd” of employees, customers, business partners and other relevant stakeholders to generate new ideas and come up with solutions to business challenges.Learn More »

A Customer Empathy Map is a strategic tool that is used to develop a thorough understanding of the customer or client who will be using a new product or service. More specifically, an empathy map forces individuals who are part of innovation or marketing teams to consider customer attitudes towards the product or service and their behavioral response to it.Learn More »

A Customer Problem Statement is a detailed description of an issue that needs to be addressed by a problem-solving team. It is written to focus the team at the beginning, keep the team on track during the innovation project, and to confirm that the team delivered an appropriate solution that addresses a real customer need at the end of the project.

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Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to problem-solving used to create new and innovative ideas for business. Design Thinking includes a mindset focused on discovering people’s problems and challenges, and then using those to develop practical solutions to address them.

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A Disruptive Innovation is one that uses new technologies or business models to make existing products and services accessible to the market. To be considered disruptive, the product or service should be made more affordable, targeted to a less profitable or untapped segment of the market, or benefit all of the parties in a network or business model in a new way.Learn More »

An Empathy Interview is an open-ended conversation between two or more people with the intention of uncovering information motivations, thoughts and feelings so that innovative products and services can be created to address problems and jobs-to-be-done.Learn More »

Ethnographic Research is an information gathering method for obtaining data about people’s needs, desires and preferences. In business, this information is typically part of the Design Thinking process used when creating a new product or service.Learn More »

An Experiment Canvas is a way to lay out all of the risk factors and key assumptions being made about a potential new product or service being developed. A useful canvas will have space to list the assumption under scrutiny as well as a way to test it and measure the results.Learn More »

An Innovation Funnel Management Process is the approach used to narrow down ideas for an innovation process or project into a feasible and realistic plan of action. The general process of the innovation funnel consists of generating a large number of possible ideas, a handful of which are then fine-tuned and converted into formal development plans, thus creating a “funnel shape.”Learn More »

The Innovation Horizons Model, also called the three horizons model, is a framework that organizations can use to identify areas for innovation and improvement without losing sight of current performance. This model is useful for driving innovation while preventing the types of organizational stagnation seen in many mature companies.Learn More »

An Innovation Matrix is a way to visualize the different dimensions that exist for creating a new product or service. The matrix can include various variables, but usually two variables are used: Competence (i.e., the ability within the company to come up with and execute an innovation) and Commitment (i.e., how important the innovation is to the organization).Learn More »

An Innovation Roadmap is a visual depiction of the steps to be taken to achieve a strategic goal driven by innovation. As a strategic tool, an Innovation Roadmap lays out the specific actions that should be implemented over time to create new products, services, or business models.Learn More »

Jobs to be Done is best described as a perspective through which new product ideas can be evaluated for usefulness and viability. Understanding your customers’ Jobs to be Done helps determine what specific needs, pain points, or problems to focus on during the innovation process.

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Lean Startup is a methodology for developing new businesses and products with the goal of shortening product development cycles with frequent use of prospective customer contact, learning, and iteration. The Lean Start-up approach is most often used by early-stage startups, but more and more corporate ventures and innovation teams use the approach, tools, and templates to test and validate new business concepts.

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Listening Hats (also known as Six Thinking Hats) is a strategic tool that can be used while generating ideas for a new product or service. This tool is especially useful because it forces the individuals on the innovation team to consider options from a completely different perspective from which they normally would. Additionally, in a group setting, the Listening Hats tool allows every member of the team to view each option from many different perspectives at the same time.Learn More »

A Minimum Viable Product (also known as an MVP) is any early product that meets the minimum standards to be able to be shared with customers and other stakeholders for the purpose of collecting feedback and test assumptions.Learn More »

An Open Innovation Process emphasizes the use of external ideas and approaches to create and market new products and forces your innovation team to deliberately gather external insight from suppliers, partners, distributors, think tanks, and other external sources of information and technology. The method differs from those that came before, because it recognizes that the boundaries between the organization and others within the industry are more flexible, which, if used properly, create more impactful products or services.Learn More »

Outcome Driven Innovation is a strategy for creating an innovation centered around fulfilling a customer need. The success of the innovation is dictated by customer-defined metrics and therefore it becomes critical to understand how the client measures value.Learn More »

Painstorming is a method that is used to discover the real factors that underlie new opportunities for an organization. More specifically, Painstorming is a more targeted form of brainstorming that allows the innovation team to critically think about the ails or problems facing an industry, the business climate, the client base, or a particular product or service.Learn More »

Rapid Prototyping is a process for quickly creating mock-ups, models, or renderings of a product, service, process, or business model.

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Saturate and Group is part of the innovation design thinking process in which the designers of a product or service create a big collage of observations, insights gleaned from stakeholder interviews or other interactions, personal experiences, organizational data, notes and drawings about a specific topic or opportunity.Learn More »

SCAMPER is an acronym that is used to help prompt creative ideas for improving existing products or services or creating new innovations. The letters in SCAMPER stand for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse. Each letter is associated with a string of questions that can be asked about existing products to discover methods of improvement or entirely new opportunities.Learn More »

S-Curve Mapping is the process used to identify the different phases of evolution of a product, services, business process to identify innovation opportunities to competitive advantage. S-curve maps plot product or industry performance along the axes of time and performance. The model can be used to determine how mature and established an organization is within the industry or how well-developed the industry is itself.Learn More »

The Phases and Gates Process is an innovation management process in which a new initiative is divided into specific phases separated by “gates'” that represent decision points across the product development process.

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Startup Innovation Management is a systematic process used by established companies to identify and work with startups, usually as part of a broader “open innovation” strategy.Learn More »

The Technology Life Cycle Model shows the journey a technology takes, from birth to eventual death and the stages in between. Understanding the Technology Life Cycle helps companies predict when they will be able to recover the investment they put into development, and when to plan for new projects.Learn More »

Technology Scouting is a strategic process that serves to accomplish three goals: (1) identifying new technologies, (2) acquiring information about new technologies for the organization and (3) acquiring these new technologies for the organization.

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Teece’s Win-Lose Innovation Model describes the steps that organizations can take to ensure that they actually profit from their innovative products and services before competition replicates the product and pulls ahead in bottom-line performance. This model focuses on how an organization can obtain the proper legal protection to prevent this scenario from occurring.

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A Value Proposition Canvas is used to ensure that the product or service being created is centered around customer wants and needs. Specifically, this tool outlines what the customer expects to gain from the product or service, any negative experiences they may have as a consequence of using the product or service and the tasks they hope to accomplish with the product or service.Learn More »

White Space Innovation is the process of identifying and creating entirely new market opportunities outside of existing markets and business models. Specifically, White Space is defined to be the market or customer needs that have not yet been fulfilled by existing solutions but could be met through the creation of a new product or service.Learn More »