Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

Appendix B. Visual Frameworks for Guiding Your Innovation Efforts

Choosing and Communicating an Innovation Focus

Organizations can try to innovate in all parts of their business at the same time, but not necessarily in radical ways. One organization (and especially its customers) can only absorb and adopt so much innovation at one time. Communicating the innovation strategy and goals of different parts of a business in a clear and concise way works best with some simple visualizations for employees to work with.

We will present two different visual frameworks to supplement a more typical approach—innovation strategy and goals mapped out across products or product families.

These two visual frameworks will clarify your business for the stakeholders that you choose to share them with (stakeholders involved should at a minimum include your employees). These simple frameworks will enable stakeholders to imagine a flood of new ideas. In addition to generating a wealth of new ideas, your stakeholders will now be able to target their ideas toward specific part of the framework (they will be able to see where they fit)—enabling much better relevancy and categorization.

To create these frameworks, start with a cross-functional team of three or four people whom you consider to be open-minded, lateral thinkers with experience in the business so that they will be able to completely imagine the full spectrum of components that ought to be included in the framework. The operations framework especially ...