Integrating Innovation Management for Disruptive Growth Alignment

This article is a companion to Creative Production Flows for Distributed Innovation Teams. It should be noted that the Innovation Accelerator is now part of SogetiLabs’ Thinkubator Business enterprise innovation platform and services.

Innovation Management is critical in innovation pipelines deployed on Thinkubator Business. All the creative output from design thinking will yield little results if the production is not aligned with enterprise innovation growth objectives. This alignment is essential for delivering a positive impact to the business.

Innovation management is the link to the enterprise core in the following ways:

• Executive review for alignment of design
• Executive support for vision
• Verifying product/market fit with growth strategy
• Verifying business model design with growth strategy and enterprise architecture
• Supporting scaling strategy transferring value to the enterprise core

Vision Design

Where there is no vision, design perishes. Vision design provides an opportunity to create new meaningful products and services from internal values and experiences. 

Creating meaning is one definition of design. Innovators bring meaning into the world via their new products and services. While human-centered design focuses on pulling insights from the user, vision design for meaning allows the innovator to explore what new meaning can be created based on core personal values, experiences, and interpretation. 

These are some of the ways meaning in vision design can be approached:

• Product – What new meaning will the new product or service embody?  What value and brand creates emotional resonance with customers?
• Business Model – Meaning can also be conveyed in the design of the business model.  New experiences project meaning that engage customers in ways that are more dynamic and carry across over time.
• Culture – This is meaning creation on a macro-scale.  How will the vision of the new product or service impact culture at large?  How does its design change social behaviors or norms?

Product/Market Fit

Product/market fit allows the innovation team to determine if there is in fact a market opportunity for the point-of-view being developed. There is no sense in carrying a design flow forward if the product/market fit assessment determines either there is no demand or the space is already crowded with competition. 

An Opportunity Matrix is a great visual way to concisely represent the nature of the market opportunity. The Matrix also gives the first signs of the competition that may already be in the market.  Use the Matrix to spot the openings in market segments with your innovation. The opportunity matrix can be plotted by doing the following exercise:

• List the market segments that the product/service is targeting
• List factual attributes, or specification characteristics about the product/service
• List emotional attributes, or brand promises generated by the product/service
• Assign these attributes to the axes of the matrix
• Plot the competition in the market segments along with your new product/service

Ideally, your new product/service will land in an open space in the matrix.  This open space represents a real market opportunity for your product/service.

Figure Opportunity Matrix

Business Model Design

Business model design delivers the mechanism to deploy the product or service in order to create, distribute and capture value. No product/service is created in a vacuum. 

Consider the difference in value created by the Diamond Rio MP3 player vs the original iPod. The Rio shipped as a standalone product while the iPod was delivered with an industry disrupting business model named the iTunes Store. Apple was able to generate tremendous amount of value by wrapping the iPod with an innovative business model.

Business models can be considered the actual value generation engine where the product/service is the delivery mechanism.  In this way, Minimum Lovable Products that deliver quantum value have innovative business models attached.  To begin designing a business model, a Business Model Canvas is a helpful tool to provide organization and structure to the different aspects of value creation and delivery.

Figure Business Model Canvas

Some key considerations when designing a business model include:

• Network effects
• Distribution
• Differentiation
• Scalability
• Leverage of AI + Machine Learning

When designing a new business model it is useful to take inventory of the catalog of patterns already proven to work. Business models can be classified using various archetypes which rely on an underlying operating model. The elements in these patterns are leverageable across sectors and thus can serve as baselines for business model design.

Some example business model patterns are:

• Multi-sided Platform – business model where producers and consumers can contribute to value creation thereby expanding the reach via its ecosystem.

• Aggregator – business model that serves to bundle services or information, add value and then redistribute to target customer segments.
• Exchange – business model where buyers and sellers are matched in order to reduced transaction costs.

To use design thinking for designing business models, check out the article Using Design Thinking to Design Business Models.

Scaling Strategy

The scaling strategy measures product/service performance in order to validate the business model and also identify any adjustments that need to be made in order for the innovation impact to be realized. Visualization dashboards are an effective way to track business performance of the new product/service. These visualizations provide at-a-glance context and indicators of how the product/service is performing along key dimensions as well as identify opportunities for improvement.

There are many industry techniques available for determining what matters for your Minimum Lovable Product. These factors can include user experience, functional performance, business model parameters or even brand promises. Other approaches can be applied such as KPIs, KRAs and OKRs.

Another useful insight provided by a scaling strategy is identifying adjacent markets where additional value can be captured by enhancing product/service or pivoting if necessary. Designing product/services with access to these options is an integral part of defining a scaling strategy.

Innovation Horizons

Thinkubator Business also facilitates the invention of the future through innovations that modernize the core, transform existing business models, or create completely new markets and value creation mechanisms.

With Thinkubator Business, the Three Horizons are time-independent and characterized by level of impact. Innovations in Horizon 3 can be deployed as rapidly as those in Horizon 1.

The Horizons help to prioritize and strategize disruption by the enterprise.   

For more information on how Thinkubator Business can help your enterprise implement innovation management with creative production flows contact SogetiLabs here https://labs.sogeti.com/contact-us/. Or leave a comment on this article and we’ll be happy to contact you to begin a conversation.