Adaptive Innovation is a method for individuals, teams and organizations to systematically develop an effective innovation model in three steps:

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Interactive Approach

We have made it incredibly straightforward to systematically develop effective innovation models with a set of free-to-use interactive canvases that enable innovators to develop tailored innovation models for their unique challenges.

In addition to the above strategy canvases, we also provide a matching journal canvas. An innovation journal helps visualizing and describing ongoing innovation efforts, generates transparency and encourages continuous improvement.

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Who it is for

Innovative Organization

Adaptive Innovation is designed for ambitious innovation initiatives in medium and large organizations. With no limitations to the amount of interconnected innovation objectives and innovation models, it supports large-scale initiatives across various interdisciplinary teams. At the same time, the structure we suggest for innovation models embraces the nature of distributed decision-making across different levels of activity.

Early stage startups and smaller innovation teams regularly follow established innovation methods like Lean Startup and will notice that Adaptive Innovation embraces the same foundational principles. Consequently, when focusing on a single innovation objective and assuming a simple communication structure, the canvases will lead to equally straightforward suggestions.

For both applications, Adaptive Innovation is non-prescriptive and non-presumptive, offering a practical approach to innovation across organizations of any industry or purpose.

Innovation Drivers

The central goal of Adaptive Innovation is turning unnecessarily long, costly, and frustrating detours into valuable learning experiences for everyone. To achieve that, we want to emphasize the importance of combining the talent and experience of all roles contributing to innovation, regardless of their background:

1. Product managers, designers, engineers and other innovation practitioners can establish a common language for cross-functional collaboration.

2. Consultants can find support articulating the value of a structured and effective innovation model to win the hearts and minds of their clients.

3. Investors and Venture Capitalists can assess the potential of their ventures more effectively through a standardized method of innovation progress.

4. Managers and Executives can utilize a clear framework to evaluate the health of their innovation processes, ensuring consistency in corporate innovation efforts.

5. Social Innovators can tackle societal issues effectively and drive change within complex systems like healthcare, education, or cities, etc.

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How to use it

All material is available for free and the canvases are published under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. You can use them with online whiteboards like Miro, FigJam or MS Whiteboard by simply dropping them into you boards. Or you go oldschoold and print them to always have them visible in your office. The provided files are vector graphics that can be scaled to any size.

The license further empowers others to build upon our work, even for commercial purposes, as long as modifications are shared back. And while you cannot put your company logo on these canvases and sell it as your own, you can for sure adopt them to specific use-cases or translate them into other languages, adding your name to the list of contributors on the bottom left.

Another great way to contribute to this project is through feedback and sharing your experience with us, which is our primary source for improvement and development of Adaptive Innovation.

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Most people associate a notion of progress with innovation - an improved approach to address a problem or desire. As for the involved activities, we think of ideation, exploration, and experimentation, a creative learning experience, an equally challenging and joyful journey that leads to impactful outcomes.

When innovating with collaborators in a team or in a larger organization, exchanges of perspectives should feel like a mutually rewarding process of improved understanding. Successful innovation implies significant personal growth and a strong sense of purpose. 

An effective innovation environment will not only yield the most impactful results but also the most valuable experiences. 

When contributors to innovation lack such valuable experiences, their innovation environment is almost certainly ineffective. Impact will fall behind expectations and frustration will sprawl from all sides sooner or later. Such experiences are avoidable and this is the reason why we created this guide. It is dedicated to all the great minds who want to move their mission forward with joy and impact at the same time.

Our goal is to show a structured approach toward establishing an effective innovation environment that yields the best results and implicitly the most valuable experiences.

While sketching out this approach, we will emphasize the importance of validation, encourage consistent learning and explain how to systematically work towards innovation success. Finally, we will introduce tools for building an innovation framework based on a few simple but powerful principles.

As a starting point, let’s explore the limitations of established innovation methods and the resulting gaps that we address with this guide.

Established Approaches

Lean Startup

Lean Startup is great at establishing a continuous learning cycle that spans the different aspects of innovation success and, most importantly, introduces the concept of riskiest assumption testing to fail fast and adapt accordingly.

However, Lean Startup does not explain on a foundational level how it can be integrated into larger organizations with distributed decision-making. While literature gives many great examples of validation methods, every innovator is assumed to find and integrate the right tools of validation on their own - a massive challenge in itself.

Design Thinking 

Design Thinking provides us with amazing user-centric validation methods for a wide range of ideas. It primarily uses visual communication to facilitate the exchange of different perspectives and helps bridge gaps of understanding.

However, Design Thinking is primarily a research method and neither explains when to research what nor what to do with the findings. In isolation, design thinking therefore regularly contributes to arbitrary goals and is oftentimes misused to primarily find supporting evidence for an already formed opinion.

Agile Frameworks

Agile has given the world a systematic approach to forming highly effective self-organized teams. It successfully reshaped how many teams nowadays work towards solutions in flexible collaboration models, driven by desired outcomes instead of micro-managed requirements.

However, agile makes no suggestions of how innovators can consistently connect insights generated on the operational level with strategic decision-making in other parts of an organization. Oftentimes this leads to a focus on micro-level optimization in the presence of ungrounded strategic objectives and priorities.

Why not just combine them?

As the three methods partially cover each other's blindspots, it feels intuitive that a clever combination should get us closer to a solid innovation process. And indeed, it’s not difficult to find innovators that were able to successfully combine and leverage these methods.

However, we see substantially different manifestations of these combinations in addition to many other tools that are highly relevant to successful innovation initiatives. At the same time, we can see many approaches to innovation that cannot be described as such a combination at all.

Generally speaking, a plain combination of lean, agile, and design thinking does not explain how these methods integrate into other processes and tools specific to an innovator’s context. Most importantly though, it’s unclear how different collaboration models and company cultures are connected with these methods and which communication needs they introduce.

That is what more generic innovation frameworks try to address. 

Generic Innovation Frameworks

Double Diamond

The double diamond separates the innovation process into a problem and a solution space. This structure can be a helpful mental model to summarize a phase of research and structure the related reports and presentations.

However, it's not a good idea to use a problem-solution perspective to structure a living validation process. In reality, problem and solution space constantly inform each other and are explored in parallel. Just look at various design thinking techniques and how many of them explore problems through a solution lens and vice-versa.

Further, with this process, it is not intuitive to describe where the three aforementioned commonly used methods would fit in, which is another indicator that the chosen level of abstraction is not suitable for defining an actionable framework.

Most importantly though, the double diamond lacks an explanation on how to decide whether more iterations over the problem and solution space are necessary. Even worse, it is regularly misinterpreted as a linear process where the problem space is never revisited once solutioning has started.

Product Discovery Framework

In contrast to the double diamond, the product discovery framework comes much closer to a meaningful representation of open-ended innovation processes as we regularly observe them in reality. Also, the vocabulary is similar to what has been established by the aforementioned established approaches - a good indicator for actionability.

However, a key problem with this framework is that it does not account for different levels of learning. In the above process, one can generate learnings that can affect implementation details just as well as a roadmap or even a business model. 

It is crucial to explicitly explain how learning for these substantially different areas is reliably generated, especially when decision-making and the generation of insights are distributed across various activities and roles in an organization.

We have good reasons to believe that this challenge can never be an afterthought but must be addressed at the foundation of a method or framework.

Identifying the Gap

So far we focused on methods and practices that are widely used and valued. We and our collaborators have encountered all of them in practice, oftentimes in very different contexts with hugely different results. And as much as we value each of them at what they do well, we also grew increasingly frustrated at how easily innovators can still be put on the wrong path.

We realized that the established methods left us with three important problems that together create a significant gap:

1. Distinguishing learning about details from learning about the big picture

2. Systematically linking validation activities to progress and success in innovation

3. Clarifying how validation activities are embedded in organizational communication

Addressing The Gap

We doubted that the solution to addressing this gap was another collection of case studies and isolated abstract concepts. Instead, we decided to develop a structured guide that explains how to purposefully mix and match the many valuable tools and methods out there to successfully drive innovation.

The ultimate goal of this guide is to enable everyone to define an innovation framework that fits their needs and adapts to their specific innovation challenges, hence the name Adaptive Innovation.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, we want to encourage innovators to identify the best tools that match their specific challenges and build their own innovation framework around them, yet guided by powerful universal principles.

These principles are brought to life in a set of interactive canvases, designed for use by all kinds of innovators. For that, we chose concepts accessible to people from a wide range of backgrounds. Our goal is to enable innovators to collaboratively tailor an innovation process that highlights their values and embraces their preferred ways of collaboration and communication.

Getting Started

Adaptive Innovation is designed to be useful to organizations of any size, industry, or purpose and applies to innovation processes beyond the development of commercial products. To help innovators accomplish their mission, we developed a series of interconnected canvases that we explain in detail throughout this guide.

In a Nutshell

We divide the development of effective innovation models in three steps:

What defines success, greatly depends on how mature an innovation is. For that reason, we divide the innovation journey into different innovation stages. Each stage adds a different context to innovation objectives and consequently suggests substantially different methods to achieve them.

The innovation objectives provide a systematic approach for innovators to define innovation success for the various innovation stakeholders in the context of their current innovation stage along the innovation journey. The combined results are innovation objectives that are later used to structure the innovation model.

The innovation model helps innovators outline and formalize how they intend to reach their innovation objectives. For each innovation objective, innovators generate and regularly update their innovation model. It describes how learning and communication shape the validation process and how assumptions are systematically turned into insights.

Step 1: Identify Innovation Stage

The Innovation Journey

Every innovation starts with a mission that the innovation aims to achieve. This mission could solve a problem, improve a process, create a new market, or meet a specific need. However, fulfilling this mission is rarely a straightforward process. It often involves a long and complex journey with numerous challenges and obstacles.

The innovation journey is composed of multiple, distinct stages that all require a different way of thinking about the innovation process and its objectives. While it might seem straightforward, identifying and agreeing upon the specific stage a team or organization currently occupies is often a source of confusion and disagreement.

This misalignment can create significant challenges, as a shared understanding of the current stage is essential for establishing a unified vision and aligning innovation objectives. Without this clarity, teams may find themselves working at cross-purposes, pursuing conflicting goals, or investing resources in initiatives that are misaligned with the organization's current needs and priorities.

Therefore first things first: We want to make sure that everyone is aligned within an organization with regard to where it is located within its journey.

Stages of Innovation

Scoping

Starting with the scoping stage, innovators compare competing ideas that will lead to substantially different strategies. This stage is characterized by a mix of open-minded ideation and exploration. Here, the compared innovation strategies can represent fundamentally different approaches, including different missions, visions, values, and business models. Solutions can be and oftentimes should be prototyped here, but only with the goal of exploring assumptions so critical that they are considered prerequisites of success during later stages.

Shaping

The shaping stage starts when innovators have made their choice and committed to an idea. The entry into this stage is characterized by manifesting the ‘what’ with everything from prototypes to full-blown pilots. Development here moves from establishing fundamentals to an exploration of important implementation details. The shaping stage concludes with a solution that has proven worthwhile to a niche, early adopters, lead customers, or a test group.

Scaling

The scaling stage starts when a solution that already fares well in a small community is set to grow to a wider audience. Oftentimes, what worked for that small group, does not work for a wider audience without modifications and adaptations. Once a solution gains traction with a diverse audience, its adoption is often boosted through effective communication and incentives, commonly achieved through marketing or sales campaigns.

Stepping

Evolution kicks in when a solution has reached a point of satisfaction where new adopters cannot be effectively activated anymore in large quantities. Opportunities and challenges are now generated by continuous learning in an ever-changing world. Innovation can continue to achieve impressive results at this stage, continuously building on prior achievements. In fact, a lot of today’s crucial high-tech products have been the result of many increments on the same base concept.

From linear to cyclic

It’s important to note that the innovation journey is not linear but circular for two reasons:

1. Established market leaders with innovations in the evolution stage will not just wait and watch how new competitors take over their market with a novel and superior approach. They will regularly find themselves in a situation where they need to consider the diversification, remake, or substitution of existing solutions.

2. Despite best efforts, innovators in the scaling or shaping phase can come to realize that they have to take one or several steps back. Sometimes, fundamental issues with a solution are only figured out during the attempt of implementation or when trying to scale it. In such cases, it is not uncommon for innovators to return to an earlier stage of innovation.

However, every shift between stages needs to come with a change in perspective as the core challenges are vastly different at every stage of innovation and so are the tools and activities that support innovation.

This is very important for us to point out because a major pitfall that innovators need to avoid is moving from one stage to another (in any direction) while failing to acknowledge the implications on tools, processes, mindset, etc.

The innovation stage provides crucial context for the generation of innovation objectives. Therefore, properly identifying the current innovation stage is a precondition to innovation success.

Step 2: Define Innovation Objectives

Innovation Success

The goal of every individual step on the innovation journey is to reduce uncertainty and increase the likelihood of success. For that, innovators need to eliminate paths with unjustifiable risks and low impact while identifying paths with manageable risks and high impact. To find and stay on a reasonably promising path with confidence, innovators require indicators that they are making progress in the right direction.

While without a doubt hundreds of such domain-specific indicators exist, compiling them into a gigantic list won’t be practical. Instead, we want to present a generic approach to defining innovation objectives through a set of perspectives that are critical to all innovation, and at the same time open to interpretation, refinement, and extension. We call these perspectives aspects of innovation success.

While in itself each aspect represents a very broad perspective on innovation success, combining aspects from different perspectives allows innovators to phrase concise innovation objectives. Innovators can then identify the most relevant domain-specific guiding indicators for an innovation objective and therefore explain how innovation success and therefore progress is measured.

To get started, we suggest composing innovation objectives using the following aspects of innovation success, grouped by independent perspectives:

Aspects of Innovation Success

Stakeholder Groups

Stakeholder groups represent different aspirations that people and organizations connect with an innovation initiative. Any initiative will only be successful in the long run when the goals of all relevant stakeholder groups are met.

• Adopters are any actors that innovators need to win over with their innovation, e.g. buyers, customers, users, etc. who value empathy for their needs and an adequate solution for their problems and desires.

• Makers are the innovating organization itself, their strategic partners and suppliers, and really anyone actively working towards the same innovation mission, achieving a vision in alignment with their values while being financially successful.

• Investors are any financiers of the innovation like a bank offering a loan, VCs funding a startup, or a budget committee financing projects within a corporation. Whoever the investors are, they will want to maximize their return on investment while minimizing their risk.

When defining an innovation objective, starting with the stakeholder groups is relatively straightforward: Whose aspirations am I addressing with an innovation objective? Whose perspective am I catering to? Who am I generating insights about?

Engagement Challenges

The engagement challenges highlight the conditions for innovation stakeholders to engage with a solution. When any of these conditions are not met for a group of stakeholders, they will refuse to invest their time, money, or energy into a solution.

• Awareness is the ability of stakeholders to find and evaluate an innovation.

• Incentive is the reason for a stakeholder to invest effort (time, money, energy) when engaging with an innovation.

• Trust is the level of confidence stakeholders have in the realization of innovation and the benefits it promises.

All engagement challenges pair well with all innovation stakeholders. An innovation needs to be visible to all relevant stakeholders to even consider an engagement. Adopters, Investors, and Makers all need to see the benefit of engaging with an innovation. And fruitful partnerships among Makers require just as much trust-building as engagements with Investors and Adopters, all looking for a track record of success or even solid proof in some cases. The difficult part is to uncover which innovation stakeholder is facing the most critical engagement challenge.

Solution Challenges

Solution challenges describe the prerequisites for any concrete solution to see the light of day. When these conditions are not met, an innovation will not be able to deliver its promises.

• Desirability describes the acceptance of a solution with the target group and answers the question “How will it be useful?”

• Viability covers financial goals like profitability as well as access to necessary resources (natural, human, capital) and answers the question “How will it be sustained?”

• Feasibility focuses on whether all technological, regulatory, and similar challenges can be overcome and answers the question “How will it be achieved?”

The relationship between stakeholders and solution aspects is usually quite straightforward but we recommend thinking beyond the obvious. While desirability typically focuses on adopters like users and buyers, viability can concern every stakeholder: in an online marketplace like eBay, viability is not only a concern of makers and investors but also to sellers and therefore adopters. Feasibility will always be top of mind for makers and investors, however, in some cases, it can again become the concern of adopters, for example, when users are wondering if a promised security standard is false marketing or actually achievable.

Guiding Indicator

To make the innovation objective tangible, it’s now time to identify the best possible observable guiding indicator for that objective. Ideally, such an indicator is an objective, precise, and quantitative metric, but sometimes qualitative indicators are going to be the best available choice. Some prioritization tools will make suggestions for such guiding indicators. (e.g. Pirate KPIs and OMTM) and we encourage innovators to explore these tools together with the identification of the guiding indicator.

Once a guiding indicator is established, innovators gain strong guidance with regard to validation tooling while generating the Innovation Model. Also, the indicator will keep being relevant when working with the innovation journal.

Without systematically defining innovation success, innovators risk cultivating biases and start making implicit assumptions without realizing. Defining relevant innovation objectives is the prerequisite for generating effective innovation models.

Step 3: Generate Innovation Model

Validation at the Core

With innovation success expressed in a concise way through innovation objectives, we can now bring the innovation framework to life. For that, we are going to define innovation models for each innovation objective. Here we will explore how to enact validation with the most relevant tools and activities, while never losing direction.

The goal here is to connect the key validation tools and activities, illustrating a constant flow of knowledge: assumptions are the foundation of what we research, make, or build. The resulting output is what we use to generate valuable insights through measurement and feedback. And finally, by communicating these insights across different levels, we can generate validated learnings that in turn become the foundation of more sophisticated assumptions.

The validation process is the driving force behind reliable innovation progress across all types of organizations, sectors, and industries. The validation process informs innovators whether they are on track to reach their innovation objectives. It describes a continuous flow of information that can broadly be described as assumptions turned into insights within a mind, team, or organization. Only when insights reference prior assumptions and new assumptions are built on fresh insights, does an innovation process effectively generate progress.

This reflects a generalizable experience that numerous innovators have demonstrated and that is also emphasized by the Lean Startup methodology: when innovators actively confront themselves about what they believe they know and what they actually know, they are more likely to challenge risky assumptions early during the validation process.

In startups with the size of a team, it is this mindset in combination with proper validation practices that generates effective innovation progress. As the most relevant information about assumptions and insights oftentimes flows naturally between team members, startups have a solid chance to get it right intuitively.

However, the more decision-making becomes distributed as the organization grows, the more explicit attention needs to be paid to this critical flow of information. While different forms of organization and collaboration will encourage or discourage information flow, there is no simple recipe for how to structure large organizations to become more or less innovative.

We therefore focus on describing what an effective validation process looks like, regardless of an organization’s structure or size. For that, we identified three different levels of validation that exist independently of any organizational chart and that can apply to solo entrepreneurs, early-stage startups, mid-sized companies as well as very large organizations like corporations and government bodies: Strategy, Priority, Activity.

Levels of Validation

When we apply the idea of systematically turning assumptions into insights to these levels of validation, we end up with a refined perspective on validation that is helpful to all innovators while adding the capability of navigating organizational questions when they arise:

Strategy

Strategy describes how to reach your objectives with the resources at hand. It explains which outcomes are desired and which resources are used to generate the desired outcomes. In contrast to prioritization, strategy does not entail detailed plans or anything else that is subject to frequent change. It is brought to life through visions, models, and concepts.

• Business strategy outlines the business model, marketing and sales strategy

• Technology strategy describes the technology vision, tech stack, and system design

• Design strategy focuses on (product) vision, design concepts, and general user experience

The difficult part of formalizing a strategy is not to define individual sound parts of a strategy but to outline a unified approach. In a wider sense, design outlines what to make, technology clarifies how to implement it, and business explains why there is demand for it and how to address it. All these strategic aspects need to be connected and coherent with each other to be successful in the long-term.

Priority

Priority determines the order of activities while working towards an innovation objective and will greatly determine whether an organization will stay afloat or run out of resources before achieving the objective. The right priorities optimize available resources and reliably secure necessary future resources.

• Managed priorities are based on a detailed plan or specific goals for every role

• Lean startup prioritizes the elimination of uncertainty through critical assumption testing

• Agile’s perspective on priorities is rooted in iterative continuous development and quick adaptations based on feedback and changing circumstances.

Typically, none of these perspectives on priorities is exclusive, but depending on context and culture, an organization will naturally lean heavier towards one than the other. The more important dependencies are, the more managed a process needs to be (e.g. in construction). The higher the uncertainty, the more important it is to think lean (e.g. in deep tech). And the more relevant a stellar user experience is, the more attention needs to be paid to the agile perspective (e.g. in consumer apps).

Activity

Activity is where the rubber meets the road, and assumptions are put to the test. As established earlier, innovators need to constantly validate their approach to increase the odds of reaching their innovation objectives. The general methods of exploring reality need to be evidence-based in order to be valuable.

• Exploring fosters the understanding of problems, desires and potential solutions in an open-ended fashion

• Verifying focuses on systematically testing a hypothesis or new solution

• Monitoring ensures that already developed solutions continue to improve

It’s important to note that every assumption will be put to the test sooner or later, one way or another. The question really is not ‘if’ but ‘when’. When a solution is not performing as expected when monitoring it in production, in many cases the related insights could have already been gathered long before: Through exploring and comparing various approaches early on, or through verifying core concepts in a prototype or pilot before releasing a solution.

Macro vs. Micro Validation

In addition, we need to clarify the dotted circles in the canvas at every level of activity which are more than just a visual detail: they describe iteration within each level.

When defining strategy and priority, iterations on the micro level pull in expertise that is easily accessible without explicit validation efforts. An iteration here can represent an expert meeting, an interdisciplinary workshop, or the review of a study. Yet, the insights generated during these activities can be important to everyone and should be communicated throughout the validation process.

Within the activity level, iterations represent a continuous improvement in implementation and operation. This includes perfecting solutions just as much as improving collaboration and tooling. An iteration here could span a release cycle in software, an optimization cycle in manufacturing, or a refinement cycle in design.

These forms of micro-validation within a level of validation are typically what many organizations have mastered well. And that can actually be a problem: when people focus on obvious and well-understood issues in front of them, they are more likely to overlook less obvious but way more important macro issues. Therefore:

Successful innovators set themselves apart by mastering the validation process holistically from all relevant perspectives, constantly confirming or correcting strategy and priority based on relevant observations from activity.

Putting it all to Practice

In this part of the guide, we have described a canvas for organizations to sketch out how learning and communication establish an effective validation process and how they can actively work toward their innovation objectives.

What we are still missing at this point is a way for innovators to track their day-to-day validation efforts along their innovation journey. The Innovation Journal ties it all together in a continuous effort to monitor the innovation journey. Here innovators document their validation process and track their progress towards innovation objectives.

Next: Tracking Progress

Now it’s time to put everything together and give innovators a practical day-to-day tool to document all their efforts throughout the entire innovation journey.

We encourage innovators to maintain an innovation journal for:

• actively illustrating the flow of information that drives the validation process, maximizing transparency with regard to assumptions and insights;

• providing a source for retrospective analysis, making it easy to spot possible blind spots of past validation efforts and avoiding unwanted biases in the future;

• documenting the innovation journey for new joiners and other colleagues to provide a quick understanding of how an organization arrived at its current level of understanding.

The Innovation Model in Practice

Validating Assumptions

At its core, this canvas is driven by assumptions moving from the strategy level through the priority level downwards to the activity level. Likewise, insights move up from the activity level through the priority level to the strategy level. When innovators sketch out this flow of information and add communication activities to it, they simultaneously describe a communication model.

Ideally, every cycle starts by creating full transparency about everything that goes into the creation of strategy and priority. What is the train of thought that leads to a given strategy? What is the narrative behind a priority? How are they based on prior validation uncovered during an activity?

The left-hand side of the cycle is centered around assumption generation and exploration while the right-hand side is connected to activities for describing and processing insights generated during that exploration.

Communicating Insights

Further, this canvas is supposed to provide visibility about all contributing tools, linking to raw results. By describing how the validation process generates insights, trust around conclusions is built with all recipients, giving them an opportunity to challenge and revalidate them.

The innovation model and the innovation journal both highlight why it matters that two kinds of people should be in regular conversation with each other: those with deep insights about how things materialize in reality and those who can explain the reasoning behind strategy and priority.

This conversation can only be fruitful with a solid understanding of relevant assumptions on one side and the appreciation of insights on the other side. Moreover, critical insights are regularly generated without anyone looking for them. It’s crucial that those who have these insights at hand through their role, understand when and how to communicate them.

Learning Systematically

Structuring the validation process along assumptions and insights is the foundation of learning systematically. When the input behind strategies and priorities are framed as assumptions, everyone down the line is invited to challenge them. More specifically:

Strategy needs to make assumptions about both the presence and the future of an innovation environment, in order to explain how it will overcome the challenges ahead. In a product company, these challenges are often framed as problems and desires and the general approach to address them is usually connected to distinct competitive advantages. These assumptions must be made explicit, or otherwise new insights cannot systematically correct strategy when reality unfolds in other ways than assumed.

Priorities will be based on assumptions about invested resources and expected results of activities. And just like at the strategy level, every new insight is relevant to prioritization when it corrects an assumption that the prioritization was based on. At the same time, one common principle applies to all methods of prioritization: priorities should remain stable until the point an organization either achieves an objective or learns something new and relevant that suggests reprioritization.

Activities and everyone involved in operational roles can only make effective contributions to insight generation when they are aware of the assumptions at the foundation of strategy and priorities. Further, they will only proactively share insights when their contributions are regularly incentivized, valued and acted upon.This conversation can only be fruitful with a solid understanding of relevant assumptions on one side and the appreciation of insights on the other side.

Fostering Validation

Combining this structure for the validation process with concise innovation objectives is what makes innovation processes systematically effective. When the general direction is clear and the methods of validation are appropriate to constantly adjust the path, innovators might still make some detours, but will eventually arrive at their destination.

There will be plenty of factors that determine the speed of that journey, like individual experience, communication structure, and available resources, but as long as validation is applied throughout the process, detours are less frequent, shorter, and less expensive - hence valuable learning experiences. Overall, the innovation journey will feel to be one of growing confidence to generate the desired impact.

With validation generating increasingly concise insights and therefore progress being made towards meeting innovation objectives, the connected innovation model will require modification on a regular basis and we therefore recommend revisiting it after every innovation cycle.

Overcoming Organizational Barriers

Here it also becomes obvious why startups and sheltered innovation teams are so often successfully innovating during the early stages of their existence: as long as a reasonable innovation model is in place, communication in small groups easily keeps everyone in the loop ensuring a constant flow of assumptions to insights.

Despite their naturally lean size, early-stage startups can still benefit from explicitly stating and following an innovation model and maintaining an innovation journal for two reasons:

1. First, they might detect unwanted biases and social dynamics in their current way of working that hold them back from achieving their full potential. Explicitly reflecting on learning and communication helps resolve tensions and supports the appreciation of each other's perspectives.

2. Second, when successful, startups will almost always grow their team and at a point will also benefit from consciously formalizing their innovation models. Otherwise, they will often fall into one of the most prominent traps of rapid growth: expanding while losing the spirit and pace that made the startup a successful innovator in the first place.

However, downsizing teams and providing them with autonomy is not always a viable answer. Large organizations need to exist and innovate as such for various reasons. As long as they find ways to keep their innovation models functioning through healthy communication models, they are equally as able to reliably cultivate innovation success as lean startups.

The previously introduced levels of validation are also going to structure our understanding of systematic learning in the innovation journal. Also, we are going to continue to keep track of how tools & activities contribute to reaching an innovation objective.

We intend for innovators to populate this canvas once per innovation objective, as the validation process and the tools involved are going to be fundamentally different for the substantially different objectives.

Innovation Cycles

In the innovation journal, we structure the steps toward an innovation objective in the form of validation cycles. These cycles represent an organization’s rhythm of validation and information exchange. Cycles can be of variable length and don’t necessarily need to match the rhythm of the established collaboration cadences.

For every validation cycle, innovators need to define a validation goal. This goal should directly relate to the guiding indicator that was defined on the Innovation Model Canvas. Such a goal should target open-ended outcomes as opposed to well-defined outputs. Output metrics are vanity metrics and should be avoided. What we want to encourage is the use of success-related metrics like user satisfaction, engagement, revenue per customer, etc.

Here are a couple of examples of targets for an indicator like “user adoption rate”:

• find a valid quantitative expression of user adoption

• benchmark our adoption rate against top competitors

• understand the top reason for failed user adoption

• identify properties that distinguish adopting users

• test if measure X increases or decreases the adoption rate

Each validation cycle represents a set of validation activities that turn assumptions into insights. The designated space at the bottom provides room for capturing assumptions related to the guiding indicator at the start of a cycle as well as for documenting insights generated during a cycle.

When innovators link the outcomes of these activities (notes, reports, statistics, visualizations, prototypes, etc.), this canvas becomes a semantic description of how tools and activities shape validation over time. Consequently, it documents how innovators arrived at their current understanding and conclusions.

Conclusion

The Innovation Journal rounds up our guide to building effective innovation frameworks with an instrument for communicating, monitoring, and documenting the validation process.

We hope this guide helps innovators with diverse backgrounds to professionalize their innovation journey and look forward to hearing your stories and feedback.

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