Sweet Spot of Innovation

Innovation methods need to be balanced and timed

A sweet spot of innovation has been found and balance is achieved when a new product has proven feasible, its business model is viable and customers feel a desire to get it and use it. Thus answering the questions what, how and why?

Differentiation and competitive advantage is added when all of your competitors cannot target the same spot, or, have solutions ready.

But how can we achieve this? Short answer: constant and repeated experiments and trials at all stages!

An agile innovation portfolio management with short cycles, sprints with deliverables and reviews is a must-have to crunch the vast amount of ideas, hypotheses and early stage projects.

Strategy refined and sweet spot of innovation focused

The innovation system’s job is to keep all ideas, experiments and its outcomes in sync and documented at all times. Furthermore, from these activities metrics and insights are generated to steer innovation without latency.

A simple back-of-the-envelope-system repeatedly cycles through the following fields with a variety of suitable methods applied:

1. viability:
   1. business model innovation,
   2. customer and partner persona,
   3. vision/mission refinement,
   4. hypothesis definition,
   5. strategic initiatives
   6. innovation portfolio
2. desirability:
   1. value propositions,
   2. jobs to be done (JTBD),
   3. idea clusters,
   4. experiments (problem orientied),
   5. open innovation,
   6. challenges
3. feasibility:
   1. experiments (solution oriented),
   2. projects (NPD style),
   3. channel development,
   4. innovation metrics,
   5. crowd sourcing
4. differentiation:
   1. intelligence watch
   2. competitor persona
   3. trend analysis
5. culture:
   1. innovation DNA nurturing
   2. innovation assessments
   3. team development (e.g. 10 faces of innovation

All elements maybe applied in your process of choice, e.g. the triple-diamond innovation process,

or, higher-frequency methods (item groups 2/3 above) can be covered with a standard design thinking approach. Another way to start is using canvases such as business model canvas or innovation canvas to follow individual projects.