Innovation Tools & Templates
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Top Innovation Tools & Templates
Open Innovation
Innovation doesn’t just happen in R&D departments. Today, “Open Innovation” (also known as External Innovation) is a fundamental strategy for sourcing emerging technologies and other intellectual property from startups, universities, think tanks, suppliers, and other partners. Having a clear Open Innovation process is essential, especially one that is directly tied to and that supports your growth platforms and innovation portfolios. Use the Open Innovation app to identify external innovation targets, prioritize them, engage with them, and move them through a phased process of evaluation, from investigation to proof-of-concept to full innovation partnership.Learn More »
Innovation Culture
Based on the book, The Invisible Advantage, the Invisible Advantage Innovation Culture app gives you everything you need to create and manage your own culture of innovation for your team or organization by nurturing an environment that promotes free thinking, an entrepreneurial spirit, and sustainable value creation at all levels and across all functions. It’s a complete tool kit that anyone can use to uncover the unique, hidden drivers of innovation and then introduce fresh, intuitive approaches tailored to their organization’s specific environment.Learn More »
Portfolio Management
Portfolio Management is an essential approach for prioritizing and developing new business ideas, whether a new product, service, or project. Build a portfolio of business concepts that can be prioritized and then used to develop prototypes, proof of concepts, roadmaps, and business plans. Create as many concepts as you want using a proven template to define, prioritize, and develop opportunities over time. Place ideas and projects into categories by type, target market, launch timeframe, and more.Learn More »
Growth Platforms Manager
The Growth Platforms Application helps you identify and prioritize the “growth platforms” that represent mega-trends, emerging market spaces, or future disruptions that will become big opportunities. Growth platforms can become the catalyst for additional research and ideation, which lead to portfolios of product, service, and business model concepts. Define growth platforms using a proven strategic marketing template and then score platforms to create a portfolio based on specific criteria. Use the application to create your platform priorities to provide guidance for your business strategy, ideation process, concept development and overall innovation portfolio management processes.Learn More »
Software Program Manager
The Software Program Manager will help you manage, track, and report out on your full software project portfolio including sprints and releases. Software project management has never been easier, whether you’re an individual project manager or managing a portfolio of projects. Create projects using a simple template, define sprints, assign tasks and owners, track releases, and view and export data and reports. Ensure software projects ladder up to your business strategies, user stories, and epics. The SoftwareProgram Manager will save you time, streamline your process, and reduce the overall overhead of your software project management.Learn More »
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Dashboard
The Key Performance Indicators Dashboard gives you a simple way to manage the most important KPIs for your business. Use the KPI wizard to instantly create KPIs that measure and track quantifiable metrics for any business function or activity. Use bar charts, graphs, status indicators, status notes, and tasks with assigned owners to ensure progress toward your most important measurable goals.Learn More »
Brainstorming Process
Run a complete team brainstorm process. Generate ideas on any topic, from new products to marketing strategies to business processes. The Brainstorming Process app goes far beyond simply listing ideas. It Includes best practices for managing the brainstorm process including developing problem statements, defining ground rules, setting selection criteria, prioritizing ideas, and much more.Learn More »
RACI Manager Software App
Getting clear on roles and responsibilities is critical for any team and organization. The RACI Manager provides a simple, scalable way to create RACIs for teams and business functions that clarify who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed for specific business processes and process steps. Customize the groups that will be part of the RACI. Define the processes you want to map and the steps within them for each RACI element. Run reports that dynamically create RACI charts and tables by process, COE, or function. Search and find processes and steps anytime and track status to ensure they are being implemented successfully using your defined RACIs.Learn More »
UAT - User Acceptance Testing
The User Acceptance Testing app provides a simple yet powerful way to create, assign, track, organize, and report on user acceptance tests. Create an unlimited number of tests and assign them to team members. Define requirements, categorize tests, set priority levels, track test dates, categorize results, and track comments on any test. Use the UAT Project Dashboard to instantly gain visibility to the current status of your overall UAT project.Learn More »
70-20-10 Rule
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
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 »
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is the process of comparing an organizations performance to those of the top standards in the industry, which can be another organization within the industry or an organization in another industry that operates at the level that the industry is hoping to achieve.Learn More »
Business Case Development
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 »
Business Model Canvas
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.Learn More »
Competitive Analysis
Competitive Analysis is the process of identifying your company’s competitors and evaluating their strategies in order to reveal their relative strengths and weaknesses and discover opportunities for how to position your company to achieve competitive advantage.
Concept Screening
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
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.
Context Canvas
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 »
Critical Success Factors
Critical Success Factors are the core actions that underlie an organization’s strategic objectives that must be accomplished at the highest level possible in order to achieve the overall goals and mission of the organization.Learn More »
Crossing the Chasm
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
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 »
Customer Empathy Map
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 »
Customer Persona
A Customer Persona is marketing tool used to project and illustrate, in graphic form, an individual’s lifestyle habits, preferences, motivations, demographic background, and other key personality traits that are based on customer research and are intended to represent a broader customer segment of great importance to the company.
Customer Problem Statements
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.
Discovery Driven Planning
Discovery Driven Planning is a business process tool that distinguishes between traditional business planning and the planning required for new business ventures. Whereas traditional planning processes focus on clear goals with specific projections, Discovery Driven Planning can be used for internal corporate ventures and start-ups where the future is highly uncertain and contains many assumptions.Learn More »
Disruptive Innovation
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 »
Empathy Interviews
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
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 »
Experiment Canvas
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 »
Five Whys Process
The Five Whys Process provides business leaders and managers with a simple and easy to understand methods used in the Analyze phase of DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) within the Lean Six Sigma process.Learn More »
Focus Groups
Focus Groups are groups of individuals who are gathered to observe a new product or discuss a particular topic in order to give organizations a chance to preview customer reactions. They are also used to gauge employee reactions to an organization’s change program. Learn More »
Go To Market Strategy
A Go To Market Strategy is a strategic plan that organizations use to outline how they will bring a new product, service, or business model to market. This strategy is created with the intention of attaining competitive advantage in the industry by improving the overall product experience of the customer (e.g., reasonable price, high quality materials, etc.).Learn More »
Innovation Horizons Model
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 »
Innovation Matrix
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 »
Innovation Roadmap
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
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.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key Performance Indicators (also known as KPIs) help measure the overall performance and success of an organization. Many companies use KPIs across departments to measure the success of specific groups and the organization as a whole. In addition, Key Performance Indicators are a helpful tool in decision-making since they create visibility into the measurable success factors of an organization. KPIs can also be used to understand where a team, department or organization stands with respect to the implementation of its strategies, goals and projects.Learn More »
Leading & Lagging Indicators
Leading and Lagging Indicators are two types of measurements used when assessing performance in a business or organization. The difference between the two is that a leading indicator can influence change and a lagging indicator records only what has happened in the past.Learn More »
Listening Hats
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 »
Market Segmentation
Market Segmentation is the process of dividing a market into specific customer segments or groups that are defined around a common yet distinguishable set of characteristics, and helps marketers isolate which target customers will be positively influenced by a potential marketing or promotional strategy.
Market Sizing
Market Sizing is the process of estimating the size of a market and evaluating market trends to enable a company to make sound strategic decisions about its product investments and accurately predict growth targets.
Minimum Viable Product
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 »
Outcome Driven Innovation
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
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 »
Portfolio Management
Portfolio Management centralizes the management of all projects across an organization and their associated components, such as goals, resources, staffing, timeline, and budgets. Portfolio Management provides a high-level overview of the business’ projects and requirements, which allows managers to more effectively prioritize and implement upcoming projects based on ROI, risk factors, and strategic fit. In its broadest sense, Portfolio Management can be applied to any set of projects, but it is most often applied to business strategy and new product innovation management.Learn More »
Rapid Prototyping
Rapid Prototyping is a process for quickly creating mock-ups, models, or renderings of a product, service, process, or business model.
S-Curve Mapping
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 »
SCAMPER
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 »
SMART Performance Metrics
SMART Performance Metrics is a tool used to create criteria to help improve the chances of an organization’s business success. It is an acronym that many businesses use for different purposes, from goal-setting to performance reviews to evaluating innovation.Learn More »
SMART(ER) Goals
SMART(ER) Goals stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound, Evaluate and Re-Do. Setting SMART(ER) Goals helps to clarify ideas, focus individual or team efforts and efficiently use time and resources.Learn More »
Strategic Goals
Strategic Goals are the high-level, overarching objectives that an organization sets out to achieve over a set timeframe. They articulate what the organization plans to do to fulfill its mission and vision, and they form the foundation for designing and implementing strategic initiatives, which are the actual projects and programs that get implemented in service of accomplishing the Strategic Goals.Learn More »
Strategy Map
A Strategy Map is a clear visual representation of the major strategic objectives of an organization, usually based on a framework or model like the balanced scorecard. This representation is useful for communicating the organization’s strategy in a digestible way to employees at all levels of the organization.Learn More »
Strategy Roadmap
A Strategy Roadmap, also known as a Strategic Roadmap, is a visual depiction of where the organization currently is and where it would like to go in the future, including a plan to get from the current to the desired state.Learn More »
SWOT Analysis
SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning tool that explores an organization’s internal and external environment, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.Learn More »
Technology Life Cycle Model
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 »
Teece’s Win-Lose Innovation Model
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.
Trend Mapping
Trend Mapping is the process of graphically illustrating the key trends affecting the market in which a business operates. A Trend Map is a tool designed to help individuals increase their knowledge of the relevant context, external developments, and changes over time relevant to the market and the business’ products and services in that market.
Value Proposition
A Value Proposition is a strategic statement that defines the customer segments a company intends to target, the customer needs it intends to serve, and how it will do so competitively and profitably.
Value Proposition Canvas
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 »
Voice of the Customer Table
The Voice of the Customer Table is a template which helps business leaders and managers frame the inputs received through the process of carrying out a Voice of the Customer (VOC) exercise.Learn More »
White Space Innovation
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 »
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Innovation Templates
Create your innovation strategy quickly and easily
Use expert innovation tools for greater success