Innovation

1. Sources of ideas

   Where new ideas come from and how they reach someone who can act on them: customers, staff, suppliers, research, technology and adjacent markets. The work is to make the routes deliberate and to record what arrives.

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2. Experiments

   Breaking an idea into the assumptions it depends on and testing the riskiest one with the smallest test that could change the decision. The output is a recorded finding, whichever way it falls.

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3. Pipeline and gates

   The stages an idea passes through, the gates between them, and the criteria — kill criteria included — agreed before each gate is reached. It gives one view of every live bet and where it stands.

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4. Scaling or stopping

   The two ends of the route: moving a proven pilot into ordinary operation with a named owner, or ending a project cleanly and releasing what it held. Both are decisions with their own work attached.

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1. The Lean Startup

   Eric Ries · 2011

   Also known as Build–measure–learn, Minimum viable product

   Treat a new offer as a set of assumptions to be tested cheaply, rather than a plan to be executed.

   Build the smallest thing that tests the riskiest assumption, measure what people actually do with it, learn, and either persevere or change direction. Its contribution was to name what was being risked: not money, but the time spent building something carefully before finding out whether anyone wanted it.

   Reach for it when

   Whenever something new is being built out in full before anyone has paid for a version of it.

   Where it stops

   It suits things that can be released in pieces and measured quickly. Applied to work with long cycles, safety consequences or heavy fixed costs, minimum and viable start to fight each other.

   Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, Crown Business, 2011; building on Steve Blank’s customer development.

2. Stage-gate

   Robert G. Cooper · 1986

   Work proceeds in stages separated by decision points where a project can be stopped.

   Each gate asks the same three questions — is it still worth doing, are we doing it well, and what would justify continuing — with criteria agreed before the answer is known. The gate that matters is the one where a project is killed, and its absence is why organisations carry projects nobody believes in for years.

   Reach for it when

   Where several initiatives compete for the same money and none of them ever ends.

   Where it stops

   Applied rigidly it is slow and rewards documentation over evidence. Cooper’s own later work loosens the gates considerably for exactly that reason.

   Robert G. Cooper, Winning at New Products, Addison-Wesley, 1986; “Stage-Gate Systems: A New Tool for Managing New Products”, Business Horizons, 1990. Stage-Gate is a registered trademark of its owners and is named here only to refer to their work.

3. Effectuation

   Saras D. Sarasvathy · 2001

   Experienced entrepreneurs start from the means they have, not from a goal, and let the goal take shape as they go.

   Studying expert founders, Sarasvathy found reasoning that runs the opposite way to planning: begin with who you are, what you know and whom you know; commit only what you can afford to lose; bring in partners who shape the venture by committing to it; and treat surprises as material rather than threats. Where prediction is impossible, control over what you can influence replaces it.

   Reach for it when

   When a new venture is waiting for a market forecast that nobody can honestly produce, and when a business plan is being written for a market that does not yet exist.

   Where it stops

   It describes how experts act under real uncertainty; it is weaker where the market is known and prediction works well enough. It also offers no guarantee that the goal that emerges is worth having.

   Saras D. Sarasvathy, “Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency”, Academy of Management Review, 2001; Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise, Edward Elgar, 2008.

4. Open innovation

   Henry Chesbrough · 2003

   Good ideas can come into a company from outside and go out of it to others, and both directions can create value.

   The older model kept research inside the walls and used only what fitted the existing business. Chesbrough’s observation was that useful knowledge is widely spread, so companies gain by licensing in, partnering and acquiring — and by letting unused ideas leave through licensing or spin-offs rather than sitting on a shelf.

   Reach for it when

   When the innovation pipeline depends entirely on internal ideas, and when promising work is being shelved because it does not fit the current business.

   Where it stops

   Openness has costs: protecting what matters, absorbing what comes in, and managing partners all take capability. Opening up without that capacity leaks value rather than gaining it.

   Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 2003.

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

Ask how many initiatives were stopped at a gate in the last year. If the answer is none, the gates are approving work, not deciding about it.