Innovation management is a systematic approach to embedding innovation across people, processes and technology within an organization on an ongoing basis. But while leadership support and cultural enablement are fundamental, the practical frameworks guiding specific ideation-to-implementation activities prove critical for turning aspirations into reality.
Over the years advising companies on building innovation competencies, I’ve had the opportunity to see organizations implement a range of popular innovation frameworks – from Design Thinking to Lean Startup to Agile – some with more success than others. The key is aligning the right framework approach to an organization’s maturity, objectives, and context.
In this article, I’ll provide an overview of prominent innovation management frameworks companies commonly leverage to spur creativity, organize activities, and vet ideas. For each approach, we’ll explore background, core concepts, steps involved, key benefits and considerations for implementation. My aim is to equip leaders with knowledgeable comparisons so you can determine which methodology or combination best fits your unique innovation goals and current capacities. Let’s explore the options for systematically driving innovation progress within your teams.
1. Design Thinking
Background:
Design Thinking originated in the 1960s from architecture and product design fields focused on solving problems with creative, human-centric solutions. It evolved to encompass developing strategies and entire customer experiences. Design Thinking is now widely used for innovation across sectors.
Core Concepts:
Design Thinking centers around deeply understanding user needs before ideating solutions; prototyping and testing ideas early and often; and iterating based on feedback versus rigid planning. Key mindsets include empathy, optimism, experimentalism, and collaboration. Its creative process navigates ambiguity.
Steps Involved:
While variants exist, common Design Thinking steps are:
- Empathize: Immersive research of users’ emotions, motivations and unstated needs
- Define: Analyze insights to frame the actual problem to solve
- Ideate: Brainstorm widest range of creative solutions
- Prototype: Build rough conceptual models to experiment with
- Test: Gain user feedback on prototypes to refine concepts
- Implement: Scale fully-developed solutions
Key Benefits:
- Human-centric solutions better serving user needs
- Fosters outside-the-box creative thinking
- Rapid experimentation uncovers flaws early before large investment
- Visualizations facilitate collaboration and user feedback
- Applicable across products, services, strategies, and processes
Considerations:
- Requires customer access and qualitative research skills
- Looser structure that can seem chaotic
- Resource-intensive to test out numerous prototypes
- Challenging to balance creativity with business constraints
When It Works Best:
Design Thinking shines when solving ill-defined problems facing users or creating completely new solutions. It aligns well to organizations adept at qualitative research, committed to human-centricity, and comfortable with ambiguity.
2. Lean Startup
Background:
Eric Ries pioneered Lean Startup in 2008 as a scientific, iterative approach to developing businesses under extreme uncertainty like startups face. It leverages flexible development cycles, early customer testing and metrics analysis to rapidly validate or invalidate ideas.
Core Concepts:
Lean Startup focuses on accelerated learning using “build, measure, learn” rapid iteration loops. Teams quickly translate ideas into minimum viable products (MVP) for user response to guide priorities versus elaborate planning. They measure outcomes quantitatively, pivot based on insights, and continue testing assumptions.
Steps Involved:
- Identify target customers and their underserved needs
- Define key assumptions around solving customer problems
- Create MVPs to test assumptions – the simplest thing to run the experiment
- Gather customer feedback, measure KPIs
- Pivot, modify, or proceed to the next assumption based on the findings
- Repeat testing cycles until product-market fit is achieved
Key Benefits:
- Speed bringing minimally viable solutions to market
- Fail fast mentality preserves resources
- Data-driven decisions enhance precision
- Builds internal capacity running experiments
- Promotes collaboration with customers
Considerations:
- Requires access to rapid software development
- Potentially more geared to digital products
- Hard to uphold the rigor of decision-hygiene
- Can be difficult reconciling conflicting feedback
When It Works Best:
Lean Startup excels in developing new products and services in dynamic conditions where ongoing learning and adjustments are key. It suits teams comfortable testing unpolished versions with users.
3. Agile Innovation
Background:
Agile software development emerged in 2001 valuing flexibility, collaboration and working software over formal processes. It expanded as a mindset and organizational approach well-suited to innovation beyond IT to manage complexity.
Core Concepts:
Cross-functional agile teams work in short, iterative cycles to learn and adapt quickly versus long product roadmaps. Leadership provides context and supports self-organizing teams to solve problems creatively. Continuous integration of user feedback fuels ongoing enhancements.
Steps Involved:
- Form a small, cross-disciplinary team with specific skills
- Split effort into short, defined sprints setting development goals
- Quickly design prototype meeting sprint goals
- Show demo for user story validation and feedback
- Incorporate insights into next sprint goals and backlog
- Repeat rapid iteration cycles driving incremental progress
Key Benefits:
- Handles fluid requirements and ambiguity well
- Faster innovation cycles rapidly integrating feedback
- Empowered teams are highly engaged
- Enables emergence of solutions versus top-down style
- Easy to pivot due to modular approach
Considerations:
- Dependent on skilled talent in key roles
- Controlled top-down leadership can struggle
- Needs active user feedback for input
- Documentation often lags real-time changes
When It Works Best:
Agile methods excel where complexity or newness makes fixed outcomes unknowable. It fits organizations able to breakdown efforts into sub-projects and tolerate some initial chaos of empowered teams.
4. Disciplined Agile Delivery
Background:
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is built on Agile methods by balancing process and people considerations. Created in 2012 to guide enterprises in balancing evolving priorities across portfolios, DAD provides decision filters across levels to scale.
Core Concepts:
DAD adopts Agile’s incremental delivery approach but provides more framework, easing appropriation inside complex organizations. It focuses on people first with mindset over the prescriptive process. DAD offers a toolkit for tailoring techniques like minimum viable products and just-in-time decisions to context.
Steps Involved:
- Set business objectives collaboratively
- Determine best-fit Agile-aligned practices based on environment factors
- Form cross-discipline feature teams & priority backlog
- Iterate through continuous requirement identification, development and validation cycles
- Frequently inspect, adapt and improve process constraints emergent
Key Benefits:
- Customizable hybrid model scalable across portfolios
- Strategic alignment more embedded
- Enables consistency & coordination amid variability
- More guidance for inexperienced teams
- Supports necessary governance compliance
Considerations:
- Still requires organizational Agile fluency
- Balancing modular flexibility with integration
- Potentially too lightweight or too controlling
- More involved adoption curve
When It Works Best:
DAD offers an excellent, structured pathway into Agile-aligned innovation in complex, compliance-driven enterprises new to empowered teams and adaptable processes.
5. Jobs To Be Done
Background:
Clayton Christensen pioneered Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) theory in 2016 examining what causes customers to adopt solutions. It goes beyond demographics to study circumstances triggering needs and progress people aim to make.
Core Concepts:
JTBD framework centers around fulfilling fundamental “jobs” customers want done to resolve struggles and make progress vis-a-vis competitors. By deeply understanding jobs stimulating purchases tied to situational context versus product attributes, teams can better innovate solutions.
Steps Involved:
- Specify target customers and circumstances
- Identify what “jobs” need doing in those situations
- Map out steps in their journey trying to make progress
- Pinpoint barriers and conflicts experienced
- Brainstorm focused innovations alleviating friction points
- Develop causal metrics predicting adoption of solutions
Key Benefits:
- Ground-level view of motivations driving behaviors
- Context-specific insights missed by broad data
- Helps teams empathize with user problems
- Guides customer-centric innovation priorities
- Metrics forecast market adoption potential
Considerations:
- Research-intensive qualitative approach
- Hard shifting from product-centric thinking
- Difficult to accurately capture emotional complexity
- Translating insights into engineering criteria
When It Works Best:
JTBD is extremely useful developing new products, services and customer experience solutions by wholly reframing what users aim to achieve. It suits organizations adept at ethnographic research and re-perceiving assumptions.
Guidance On Selecting Frameworks
The reality is that most organizations use a blend of complementary frameworks as innovation management maturity advances. But starting out, carefully consider your existing capacities and targets in order to select an impactful first toolkit instilling momentum.
When advising leaders new to building innovation competencies on where to begin, I pose reflective questions including:
- What is the primary problem you’re trying to solve – product/service creation, process improvements, strategic shifts?
- Does your organization have strengths in qualitative or quantitative methods?
- What level of uncertainty and ambiguity can it tolerate?
- How fast do you need to move from idea to delivery?
- How much process structure does your culture prefer over flexible experimentation?
- What customer access do you possess to co-create and gather feedback?
- Are employees accustomed to working cross-functionally with decentralized authority?
The answers help determine if Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Agile Innovation or another approach maps best to first projects’ needs and team capabilities.
I often suggest starting with an easier win. For example, using a Design Thinking workshop to uncover impactful but feasible solutions to known customer pain points before tackling net new digital products with Lean. Quick returns generating credibility for methods like rapid prototyping fuels further buy-in.
Additionally, get familiar with key concepts across models even while focusing initial efforts on a single approach. Terms like MVPs, sprints, jobs-to-be-done, pivots, and iterating come up across frameworks. Understanding similarities and differences in mindsets helps transfer learning as your needs grow over time.
In Summary
There is no one-size-fits all prescription for managing innovation successfully. But established frameworks concentrate wisdom on how to iteratively translate ideas into reality inside organizations. They provide guardrails enabling more reliable progress versus sporadic genius sparks alone.
Take an inventory of your real capacities, leadership support, and aims before selecting a framework. While combining elements across models is common in mature innovation organizations, new entrants see the fastest results picking one approach to deeply instill versus a superficial sprinkling of many.
Whatever your first framework choice, emphasize building competencies in how to apply it with consistency at smaller scope before scaling across the enterprise milestone wins. An iterative approach makes the innovation journey less daunting.
Soon enough, the conceptual models come alive through the ingenuity of teams creatively solving problems once given the tools. But the framework itself kickstarts momentum by establishing an essential common language and lubricating the predictable blocks threatening progress at scale. So choose wisely and then fully invest in training and project support to set your teams up for ongoing innovation success.
