Embracing What Works

A guide to Adaptive Innovation: Part 1 of 3

Creating Value with Innovation

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.