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The Ideation Lifecycle

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Aligning Distinct Behavioral Archetypes with Stages of Growth

The Ideation Lifecycle

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The Human Engine of Growth

Too often, organizations face an invisible wall. They have the capitalization, the market opportunity, and a product that shows immense promise, yet scaling stalls. Leaders pore over financial models, tweak operational processes, and restructure reporting lines, completely missing the underlying reality: companies fail to scale because they have the wrong human behaviors driving the wrong stage of growth. Growth is not merely a sequence of financial milestones; it is a human evolution.

The Paradigm Shift: From Persona to Archetype

For years, design and marketing have leaned heavily on static personas—demographic and psychographic snapshots of who people are. But in the fast-moving landscapes of innovation and change management, who someone is matters far less than how they act, think, and decide under pressure.

By shifting our focus toward fluid behavioral archetypes, we unlock a deeper understanding of organizational chemistry. Archetypes capture dynamic mindsets and problem-solving styles. When we map these behavioral patterns to the distinct horizons of business expansion, we gain the ability to intentionally design the human ecosystem required for sustained success.

The Core Thesis

Sustainable innovation, seamless customer experiences, and successful organizational scaling require leaders to dynamically align distinct behavioral archetypes with the specific cultural and strategic demands of each growth stage. To try to solve tomorrow’s scaling problems with yesterday’s behavioral archetypes is a recipe for stagnation. Success lies in matching the right mindsets to the right moment.

Demystifying Behavioral Archetypes vs. Growth Stages

To build a truly agile, human-centered organization, we must first change how we look at our people. Traditional demographic profiles or rigid job descriptions are no longer sufficient. Innovation and digital transformation require a shift toward behavioral archetypes—and a clear understanding of how these mindsets interact with the natural lifecycle of organizational growth.

Why Behavioral Archetypes Supercharge Innovation and Change

Unlike traditional personas, which anchor people to static identities or demographic boxes, behavioral archetypes focus purely on mindsets, decision-making patterns, and operational motivations. They answer the critical questions: How does this person approach ambiguity? What drives their problem-solving? How do they handle risk?

In times of rapid change, archetypes allow leaders to look past job titles and tap into the underlying cognitive diversity of their workforce. By focusing on behavioral archetypes rather than static roles, organizations can build fluid, cross-functional teams optimized for specific challenges, fostering an environment where Adaptability Quotient (AQ) can truly thrive.

The Lifecycle of Growth: From Inception to Renewal

Every product, service, or organization moves through a predictable lifecycle of evolution. While various business models slice these phases differently, from a human and experience design perspective, growth breaks down into four critical cultural horizons:

  • Inception & Exploration: Navigating extreme ambiguity to uncover deep customer needs and find a problem worth solving.
  • Validation & Fit: Turning raw, chaotic ideas into a structured, repeatable, and high-value customer experience.
  • Acceleration & Scaling: Stripping out operational friction, optimizing processes, and expanding market reach rapidly.
  • Maturity & Renewal: Protecting and optimizing the highly successful core business while actively exploring the next S-curve of growth.

The Friction Point: When Mindsets and Milestones Misalign

The most dangerous operational blind spot occurs when an organization successfully transitions to a new growth phase financially or structurally, but its culture remains stuck in the previous one. This mismatch creates severe organizational friction.

For instance, if a company enters the Scaling phase but tries to run it using the chaotic, highly unstructured behavioral mindsets that worked beautifully during Inception, the result is operational whiplash and strategic burnout. Conversely, injecting highly rigid, process-driven optimization mindsets into the early Exploration phase will suffocate creativity before it can take root. Recognizing and proactively managing this alignment is the core responsibility of modern leadership.

Mapping the Matrix: Archetypes Aligned to Growth Stages

To successfully navigate the organizational lifecycle, leaders must intentionally place specific mindsets at the helm of each stage. Below is the behavioral blueprint for matching human archetypes to business horizons.

Stage 1: Inception & Exploration (The “Zero to One” Phase)

Primary Objective: Finding a problem worth solving under conditions of extreme ambiguity.

The Ideal Archetype: The Catalyst Explorer

  • Key Characteristics: High tolerance for ambiguity, deeply empathetic listener, naturally curious, comfortable with rapid failure and pivot cycles.
  • Role in this Stage: The Catalyst Explorer is built to wade into chaos. They excel at talking to customers, looking past surface-level complaints, and uncovering deep, unspoken frustrations. They do not look for clean data; they look for friction points and insights.
  • Strategic Impact: They prevent the organization from falling in love with a solution too early, ensuring that the initial value proposition is rooted in a real, deeply felt human need rather than internal assumptions.

Stage 2: Validation & Product-Market Fit (The “One to Ten” Phase)

Primary Objective: Proving commercial value, refining the experience, and establishing a repeatable value delivery model.

The Ideal Archetype: The Value Architect

  • Key Characteristics: Expert pattern-recognizer, holistic systems thinker, analytical yet user-obsessed, highly iterative refiner.
  • Role in this Stage: If the Explorer finds the raw gold, the Value Architect builds the mine. They take the raw insights and scattered prototypes from Stage 1 and translate them into a structured, functional, and repeatable customer journey. They bridge the gap between creative chaos and operational commercialization.
  • Strategic Impact: They ensure that the product or service isn’t just a “good idea,” but a stable, high-value ecosystem that can reliably deliver an exceptional user experience at a justifiable cost.

Stage 3: Acceleration & Scaling (The “Ten to One Hundred” Phase)

Primary Objective: Rapid market expansion, organizational optimization, and stripping out operational friction.

The Ideal Archetype: The Scalability Evangelist

  • Key Characteristics: Highly collaborative, process-oriented, champion of operational excellence, master of cross-functional alignment.
  • Role in this Stage: This phase requires a cultural shift from “building” to “multiplying.” The Scalability Evangelist codifies the experience. They build the playbooks, break down operational silos, and ensure that as the company grows by 10x or 100x, the core quality of the human experience doesn’t degrade. They evangelize the vision across expanding teams.
  • Strategic Impact: They remove individual dependencies, turning a bespoke operation into an optimized growth machine capable of handling volume without losing its cultural or experiential soul.

Stage 4: Maturity, Continuous Improvement & Renewal (The “One Hundred to Beyond” Phase)

Primary Objective: Defending core market share while simultaneously identifying and seeding the next S-curve of growth.

The Ideal Archetype: The Dual-Drive Futurist

  • Key Characteristics: Long-term vision, cognitively ambidextrous, risk-intelligent, capable of balancing present operations with future possibilities.
  • Role in this Stage: Mature organizations naturally default to complacency and risk aversion. The Dual-Drive Futurist fights this inertia. They possess the unique ability to respect and protect the highly profitable core business (the “Cash Cow”) while simultaneously advocating for, funding, and protecting the fragile new innovations that will replace it tomorrow.
  • Strategic Impact: They prevent corporate obsolescence. By constantly injecting fresh, human-centered foresight back into the mature ecosystem, they trigger a renewal phase before the decline curve sets in.

The Dilemma of the “Archetype Shift” (Managing the Change)

Identifying the right archetypes is only half the battle; the real test of leadership lies in managing the transitions between them. As an organization successfully moves from one stage of growth to the next, the dominant cultural mindset must shift accordingly. This transition is rarely seamless, and if unmanaged, it creates profound organizational friction and human anxiety.

The Human Cost of Growth

Growth is inherently disruptive to the human ecosystem. When a company transitions, for example, from validation to rapid scaling, the unconstructed freedom that early employees loved is replaced by standard operating procedures and metrics.

The “Catalyst Explorers” who thrived in the chaotic early days may feel constrained, micromanaged, or sidelined by the arrival of process-driven “Scalability Evangelists.” Conversely, if a company needs to pivot and reinvent itself, employees optimized for optimization may resist the sudden reintroduction of ambiguity. Left unaddressed, these shifts lead to cultural fracturing, loss of key talent, and operational paralysis.

The Leader’s Responsibility: Intentional Realignment and Upskilling

Thoughtful leadership requires recognizing that people do not need to be discarded when a growth stage changes; instead, their focus must be intentionally realigned. Leaders must act as talent orchestrators by taking the following steps:

  • Conduct Regular Mindset Audits: Continually evaluate the Adaptability Quotient (AQ) and natural behavioral inclinations of the team against the current strategic horizon.
  • Provide Clear Paths for Upskilling: Help team members understand how their core strengths can manifest differently in a new phase—such as helping an Explorer apply their deep customer empathy to training new hires during a scaling phase.
  • Honor Past Contributions: Ensure that the foundational work of previous stages is celebrated, preventing a cultural divide between the “old guard” and “new scaling experts.”

Designing Organizational On-Ramps and Off-Ramps

To prevent friction, organizations must design explicit behavioral handoffs. This means creating a psychologically safe environment where one archetype can gracefully pass the baton to the next.

For instance, when a product moves from validation to scaling, a formal “hand-off architecture” should be established. The Value Architects should collaborate directly with the Scalability Evangelists, ensuring that the operational blueprints preserve the core integrity of the original user experience. By designing these structural on-ramps and off-ramps, leadership transforms what could be a jarring disruption into a smooth, predictable, and empowering cultural evolution.

Conclusion: Designing a Dynamic Human Ecosystem

Growth is never a purely financial, structural, or technological milestone—it is fundamentally a human journey. The most beautifully architected digital transformation strategy or the most disruptive innovation pipeline will stall if the organization fails to align its dominant human behaviors with the strategic needs of the moment. True organizational agility requires looking past static personas and rigid job descriptions to embrace the fluid power of behavioral archetypes.

The Ultimate Innovation Lever

By intentionally orchestrating the transitions from Catalyst Explorers to Value Architects, expanding through Scalability Evangelists, and constantly renewing via Dual-Drive Futurists, leadership builds a sustainable engine for continuous growth. This intentional alignment doesn’t just drive market value; it creates a thriving, high-AQ workplace culture where individuals are uniquely positioned to do their best work exactly when the company needs it most.

A Call to Action for Modern Leaders

As you look at your own organization or product portfolio today, look past the quarterly metrics and ask yourself the tougher human questions:

  • What growth horizon are we actually operating in right now?
  • Are we trying to solve tomorrow’s complex scaling and optimization challenges with yesterday’s unstructured, exploratory mindsets?
  • Are we suffocating our next big growth engine by forcing it through rigid, mature operational frameworks too early?

The blueprint for sustained innovation lies in matching the right mindsets to the right moment. Audit your human ecosystem, design your behavioral hand-offs with empathy and intention, and build an organization capable of evolving as fast as the future demands.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do behavioral archetypes differ from traditional user personas?

Traditional personas anchor individuals to static demographic and psychographic profiles (who they are). Behavioral archetypes focus purely on fluid mindsets, decision-making patterns, and operational motivations (how they act under pressure). This makes archetypes far more effective for managing dynamic organizational change and innovation timelines.

What is the biggest mistake leaders make when transitioning between growth stages?

The most common failure point is “mindset misalignment”—trying to solve a new stage’s problems with the previous stage’s behaviors. For example, forcing a creative exploration team to follow rigid scaling processes too early suffocates innovation, while attempting to scale a business using chaotic, unstructured early-stage mindsets leads to operational burnout.

How can a leader assess if their team has the right Adaptability Quotient (AQ) for growth?

Leaders can conduct regular mindset audits to evaluate how team members handle risk, respond to ambiguity, and collaborate across silos. Measuring AQ involves observing behavioral patterns during rapid pivots rather than relying on fixed job descriptions or technical skill sets.


Image credit: Gemini

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Integrating AI into the Innovation Pipeline

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From Ideation to Execution

LAST UPDATED: November 30, 2025 at 8:21AM

Integrating AI into the Innovation Pipeline

GUEST POST from Chateau G Pato

The quest for innovation has always been constrained by human bandwidth: the time it takes to conduct research, synthesize data, and test concepts. Artificial Intelligence shatters these constraints. However, simply using AI to generate more ideas faster leads to digital noise. True competitive advantage comes from using AI to enhance the quality of human judgment and focus our finite human empathy where it matters most: the Moments of Insight.

We must move beyond the narrow view of AI as just a tool for cost reduction and embrace it as a partner that dramatically accelerates our Learning Velocity. The innovation pipeline is no longer a linear process of discovery, design, and delivery; it is a Synergistic Loop where AI handles the heavy lift of data synthesis, freeing human teams to focus on unstructured problem-solving and radical concept generation.

The AI Augmentation Framework: Three Critical Integration Points

To integrate AI mindfully, we must define clear roles for the human and the machine at three stages of the pipeline:

1. Deepening Empathy through AI Synthesis (Discovery Phase)

The Discovery Phase is traditionally dominated by ethnographic research. While human observation remains irreplaceable for capturing nuance and emotion, AI excels at processing vast, disparate datasets that inform that empathy. An AI system can ingest millions of customer service transcripts, social media sentiment, competitor product reviews, and historical sales figures to immediately generate a prioritized list of friction points and unmet needs. This doesn’t replace the human ethnographer; it provides the ethnographer with a laser-focused map, allowing them to spend their time understanding the why behind the patterns AI found, rather than manually searching for the patterns themselves.

2. Augmenting Ideation through AI Diversification (Design Phase)

Human teams tend to cluster around familiar solutions (Affinity Bias). AI breaks this pattern. In the Design Phase, after the human team defines the core problem, AI can be tasked with generating radical concept diversification. By training an AI on solutions from entirely different industries (e.g., applying aerospace logistics solutions to retail inventory management), it can suggest analogous concepts that humans would never naturally connect. The human team’s role shifts from generating 100 average ideas to selecting the best 5 from 1,000 machine-generated, diverse, and well-researched concepts — a massive multiplier on human creativity.

3. Accelerating Validation through AI Simulation (Delivery Phase)

The most time-consuming step is validation (prototyping, testing, and iterating). AI, specifically in the form of digital twins and sophisticated simulation models, can dramatically accelerate this. For complex physical products (like self-driving cars or new materials), AI can run thousands of scenario tests in a virtual environment before a single physical prototype is built. This shifts the human team’s focus from slow, expensive physical validation to data interpretation and hypothesis refinement. The human only builds the prototype when the AI simulation suggests a 95% likelihood of success, maximizing the efficiency of capital and time.

Case Study 1: The Financial Institution and Regulatory Forecasting

Challenge: Slow Time-to-Market Due to Regulatory Risk

A global financial institution (FinCorp) found its innovation pipeline paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. Every new product launch required months of legal review and risked fines if the regulatory landscape shifted mid-deployment. The fear of compliance risk stifled breakthrough innovation.

AI Integration: Predictive Compliance Synthesis

FinCorp deployed an AI system trained on global regulatory history, legal documents, and legislative debate transcripts. This AI was integrated into the Discovery Phase:

  • The AI scanned new product proposals and immediately generated a “Compliance Risk Score” based on predicted future regulatory shifts.
  • It identified regulatory white space — areas where new products could be safely launched with minimal legal friction.
  • Human compliance officers shifted their role from reactive policing to proactive strategic guidance, advising innovation teams on how to shape products to be future-compliant.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The AI removed the fear of the unknown, boosting the team’s psychological safety. Time-to-market for new financial products was reduced by 40% because the human teams were empowered to innovate within a clear, AI-forewarned boundary. The risk management was automated, freeing the humans to focus on value creation.

Case Study 2: The Consumer Goods Company and Material Innovation

Challenge: Years-Long Material R&D Cycle

A major consumer goods company (ConsumerCo) required years to develop new sustainable packaging materials, involving countless failed lab experiments due to the sheer volume of possible chemical combinations.

AI Integration: Generative Material Design

ConsumerCo integrated a generative AI model into the Ideation and Delivery Phase. This model was given constraints (e.g., “must be compostable in 90 days, withstand $180^\circ$C, and cost less than $0.05 per unit”).

  • The AI generated millions of hypothetical chemical formulas and simulated their real-world properties instantly (Accelerated Validation).
  • The human material scientists reviewed the top 0.1% of AI-generated formulas, using their expertise to filter for manufacturing feasibility and supply chain reality.

The Human-Centered Lesson:

The AI transformed the material scientists’ job from performing repetitive, blind experiments to becoming expert filters and hypothesis builders. This augmentation reduced the R&D cycle from four years to 18 months, leading to a massive increase in the Learning Velocity of the entire organization. The result was a successful launch of a proprietary, highly sustainable packaging line, directly attributing its success to the speed of AI-driven simulation.

The Future: Human-AI Co-Creation

The integration of AI into the innovation pipeline must be governed by a single rule: AI handles the volume, humans retain the veto and the empathy. Leaders must focus on training their teams not in how to use the AI, but how to ask it the right, human-centered questions.

Embrace the Synergistic Loop. Use AI to synthesize complexity, diversify ideas, and accelerate validation. Use your people for vision, ethics, and the profound, qualitative understanding of the human condition. That is how you drive sustainable, breakthrough innovation.

“AI does not make humans less creative; it removes the repetitive labor that prevented them from being creative in the first place.”

Frequently Asked Questions About AI in the Innovation Pipeline

1. What is the biggest risk of integrating AI into the innovation pipeline?

The biggest risk is relying on AI to generate ideas without human oversight, which leads to “algorithmic echo chambers” — innovations that are merely optimizations of past successes, not true breakthroughs. Humans must retain the veto and inject radical new, empathetic concepts that defy historical data.

2. How does AI enhance “Discovery” without replacing human ethnographers?

AI enhances discovery by acting as a powerful data synthesizer. It processes massive, unstructured datasets (like customer reviews and call transcripts) to identify patterns, friction points, and statistically significant unmet needs. This information guides the human ethnographer to focus their high-touch observation time on the most critical and complex qualitative problems.

3. What is “Learning Velocity” and how does AI affect it?

Learning Velocity is the speed at which an organization can generate, test, and codify actionable insight from experiments. AI dramatically increases Learning Velocity by accelerating the “Test & Refine” stage through simulation and digital twins, minimizing the time and cost required for physical prototyping and validation.

Your first step toward AI integration: Identify your most time-consuming, data-intensive manual synthesis task in your current Discovery phase (e.g., manually summarizing customer feedback). Prototype an AI solution to automate only that synthesis, then measure how much more time your human ethnographers spend on direct customer interaction rather than data processing.

Extra Extra: Because innovation is all about change, Braden Kelley’s human-centered change methodology and tools are the best way to plan and execute the changes necessary to support your innovation and transformation efforts — all while literally getting everyone all on the same page for change. Find out more about the methodology and tools, including the book Charting Change by following the link. Be sure and download the TEN FREE TOOLS while you’re here.

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Seven Brainstorming Techniques for Ideation Sessions

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Seven Brainstorming Techniques for Ideation Sessions

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of innovation tools come and go. They get introduced with great fanfare at conferences. Perhaps a high-profile company or two starts touting the tool. Case studies get written up, and then comes the inevitable book.

More often than not that’s where it ends. The tool fades away. Nothing more is heard. But brainstorming is the exception.

Brainstorming is a tool with staying power. Invented by advertising executive Alex Osborn in the early 1940s, it is, arguably, more popular today than ever. Silicon Valley is all in. Startups start the day doing it. Walls and desk surfaces at Nike headquarters in Portland, Oregon feature whiteboards for brainstorming ideas.

Why has brainstorming enjoyed staying power, when so many other tools fade away? Perhaps because it works for generating ideas. Provided you do it right, and comply with some fairly simple rules. Over the years of leading ideation sessions for a wide range of clients, I’ve identified some guidelines to insure success. Here are seven to keep in mind when you’re planning your next ideation session:

1. Make sure the facilitator sets the right tone. Without a strong and enthusiastic leader, the session can easily veer off course. Participants may be reluctant to let loose and engage in a sense of playfulness. At the outset, the facilitator should stress the need for brevity in making comments, and simple things like one person speaking at a time, refraining from analyzing another person’s idea, and the importance of building on other’s ideas. The facilitators’ job is to build trust. When in this role, I walk around the teams of participants and observe the body language. I observe the way the team is approaching the assignment. If they’ve bogged down, I’ll go into coaching mode, encouraging and even temporarily becoming part of the group to model the behavior that encourages risk-taking.

2. Use challenge questions to focus the session. While brainstorming is fun and mind-expanding, mostly we do it because we need fresh solutions to vexing problems. A fuzzy or unclear mission will produce fuzzy and unclear ideas. One way to clarify is with crisply defined challenge questions. My favorite is one I call “in what way?” In what way might we improve employee engagement? In what way might we add value to this customer segment? Such challenge questions spur the brain to search for alternative answers, and that’s what creativity is all about.

3. Go for quantity, not quality.  This technique is the bedrock of Osborne’s tool. It is a means of discouraging judgement and analysis, aiming to surface the maximum number of raw ideas. Shoot for 100 raw ideas in 30 minutes, and set a time limit to keep the pressure on. The greater the number of ideas generated the higher the chance of producing a radical and unconventional solution. My informal research with ideation groups over the years suggests that it takes 80 to 100 raw ideas to find one that is worth further consideration.

4. Discourage judgment and analysis. The natural human tendency is to want to analyze and discuss the merits of ideas, but the objective of a brainstorming exercise is to dream up lots of ideas and withhold judgement during the process. The more experienced and educated the group (i.e. the more degrees you’re working with) the more of a friendly drill sergeant you need to be as facilitator to get people out of their heads and into the flow. All criticism of ideas must be discouraged. It is the death knell to effective brainstorming. Instead, encourage participants to focus on turning their minds inside out for yet more ideas, for piggybacking on other’s ideas, and for finding additional ideas after they feel “tapped out.”

5. Encourage wild and even “absurd” ideas. To paraphrase Einstein, “If at first an idea doesn’t sound absurd, then there’s no hope for it.” By encouraging participants to suspend judgment of ideas, participants will feel free to generate unusual ideas, bold ideas, humorous ideas and even absurd ideas. As facilitator, if you’re not hearing frequent bursts of laughter and enthusiastic cheers now and then, somebody out there is playing the role of Debbie Downer. Find her and put a sock in her mouth! If your group is known to be overly-linear and prematurely analytical, plan a fun exercise to start the session that has nothing to do with the main brainstorm objective. Lately, for example, I’ve started sessions by doing an exercise where participants design better shopping carts, coach airline seats, or driverless cars, just to get folks thinking out of the box.

6. Make sure everyone’s ideas get captured and displayed. This is essential. To ensure that introverts as well as extraverts feel their ideas have been received, all ideas must be captured and eventually displayed on some common medium. Sometimes I’ll start a session by displaying the challenge question (“In what ways might we do X differently?”) on an easel pad, and kick off the brainstorm by having participants jot down their ideas on individual sticky notes for a period of quiet time before coming together as a team to consolidate the ideas (eliminating duplicate ideas). The trick here is having a common medium to display ideas and everybody feels an equal contributor to the session, and no idea gets lost.

7. Use “dot-voting” to rank the ideas. After you’ve brainstormed and stormed yet again, you’ll observe that participants are tapped out. At this point it’s important to take a break before beginning the analysis and idea selection phase. One method I often use to energize the idea selection phase is the simple tool called dot-voting. It works like this: each participant is given five or more sticky dots (available at office supplies stores) and instructed to place their dots as votes on the ideas they believe have the most potential. Participants are free to vote all their dots on a single idea (if they believe it’s particularly compelling) or to spread their dots to different ideas.

Once the voting is completed, you’ll have a visual representation of the group’s thinking. Rearrange the ideas so that the ones with the most dots are grouped together and ranked from most dots to least. Talk about the ideas that received the most votes and decide on next steps.

Leading these sessions is one of the most fascinating roles I am invited to lead, and I’m always learning. I’d love to hear from you as to what some of your favorite techniques are for getting groups to generate ideas. I invite you to share them with me, and perhaps I’ll write them up in a future Forbes blog post.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels

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Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation

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Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

Some authors talk about successful innovation being the sum of idea plus execution, others talk about the importance of insight and its role in driving the creation of ideas that will be meaningful to customers, and even fewer about the role of inspiration in uncovering potential insight. But innovation is all about value and each of the definitions, frameworks, and models out there only tell part of the story of successful innovation.

To achieve sustainable success at innovation, you must work to embed a repeatable process and way of thinking within your organization, and this is why it is important to have a simple common language and guiding framework of infinite innovation that all employees can easily grasp. If innovation becomes too complex, or seems too difficult then people will stop pursuing it, or supporting it.

Some organizations try to achieve this simplicity, or to make the pursuit of innovation seem more attainable, by viewing innovation as a project-driven activity. But, a project approach to innovation will prevent it from ever becoming a way of life in your organization. Instead you must work to position innovation as something infinite, a pillar of the organization, something with its own quest for excellence – a professional practice to be committed to.

So, if we take a lot of the best practices of innovation excellence and mix them together with a few new ingredients, the result is a simple framework organizations can use to guide their sustainable pursuit of innovation – the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation. This new framework anchors what is a very collaborative process. Here is the framework and some of the many points organizations must consider during each stage of the continuous process:

1. Inspiration

  • Employees are constantly navigating an ever changing world both in their home context, and as they travel the world for business or pleasure, or even across various web pages in the browser of their PC, tablet, or smartphone.
  • What do they see as they move through the world that inspires them and possibly the innovation efforts of the company?
  • What do they see technology making possible soon that wasn’t possible before?
  • The first time through we are looking for inspiration around what to do, the second time through we are looking to be inspired around how to do it.
  • What inspiration do we find in the ideas that are selected for their implementation, illumination and/or installation?

2. Investigation

  • What can we learn from the various pieces of inspiration that employees come across?
  • How do the isolated elements of inspiration collect and connect? Or do they?
  • What customer insights are hidden in these pieces of inspiration?
  • What jobs-to-be-done are most underserved and are worth digging deeper on?
  • Which unmet customer needs that we see are worth trying to address?
  • Which are the most promising opportunities, and which might be the most profitable?

3. Ideation

  • We don’t want to just get lots of ideas, we want to get lots of good ideas
  • Insights and inspiration from first two stages increase relevance and depth of the ideas
  • We must give people a way of sharing their ideas in a way that feels safe for them
  • How can we best integrate online and offline ideation methods?
  • How well have we communicated the kinds of innovation we seek?
  • Have we trained our employees in a variety of creativity methods?

4. Iteration

  • No idea emerges fully formed, so we must give people a tool that allows them to contribute ideas in a way that others can build on them and help uncover the potential fatal flaws of ideas so that they can be overcome
  • We must prototype ideas and conduct experiments to validate assumptions and test potential stumbling blocks or unknowns to get learnings that we can use to make the idea and its prototype stronger
  • Are we instrumenting for learning as we conduct each experiment?

Eight I's of Infinite Innovation

5. Identification

  • In what ways do we make it difficult for customers to unlock the potential value from this potentially innovative solution?
  • What are the biggest potential barriers to adoption?
  • What changes do we need to make from a financing, marketing, design, or sales perspective to make it easier for customers to access the value of this new solution?
  • Which ideas are we best positioned to develop and bring to market?
  • What resources do we lack to realize the promise of each idea?
  • Based on all of the experiments, data, and markets, which ideas should we select?

You’ll see in the framework that things loop back through inspiration again before proceeding to implementation. There are two main reasons why. First, if employees aren’t inspired by the ideas that you’ve selected to commercialize and some of the potential implementation issues you’ve identified, then you either have selected the wrong ideas or you’ve got the wrong employees. Second, at this intersection you might want to loop back through the first five stages though an implementation lens before actually starting to implement your ideas OR you may unlock a lot of inspiration and input from a wider internal audience to bring into the implementation stage.

6. Implementation

  • What are the most effective and efficient ways to make, market, and sell this new solution?
  • How long will it take us to develop the solution?
  • Do we have access to the resources we will need to produce the solution?
  • Are we strong in the channels of distribution that are most suitable for delivering this solution?

7. Illumination

  • Is the need for the solution obvious to potential customers?
  • Are we launching a new solution into an existing product or service category or are we creating a new category?
  • Does this new solution fit under our existing brand umbrella and represent something that potential customers will trust us to sell to them?
  • How much value translation do we need to do for potential customers to help them understand how this new solution fits into their lives and is a must-have?
  • Do we need to merely explain this potential innovation to customers because it anchors to something that they already understand, or do we need to educate them on the value that it will add to their lives?

8. Installation

  • How do we best make this new solution an accepted part of everyday life for a large number of people?
  • How do we remove access barriers to make it easy as possible for people to adopt this new solution, and even tell their friends about it?
  • How do we instrument for learning during the installation process to feedback new customer learnings back into the process for potential updates to the solution?

Conclusion

The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation framework is designed to be a continuous learning process, one without end as the outputs of one round become inputs for the next round. It’s also a relatively new guiding framework for organizations to use, so if you have thoughts on how to make it even better, please let me know in the comments. The framework is also ideally suited to power a wave of new organizational transformations that are coming as an increasing number of organizations (including Hallmark) begin to move from a product-centered organizational structure to a customer needs-centered organizational structure. The power of this new approach is that it focuses the organization on delivering the solutions that customers need as their needs continue to change, instead of focusing only on how to make a particular product (or set of products) better.

So, as you move from the project approach that is preventing innovation from ever becoming a way of life in your organization, consider using the Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation to influence your organization’s mindset and to anchor your common language of innovation. The framework is great for guiding conversations, making your innovation outputs that much stronger, and will contribute to your quest for innovation excellence – so give it a try.

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Innovation Can Come From Anyone

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Innovation Can Come From Anyone“Innovation can come from anyone, but it is required from everyone for an organization to remain successful.”

Or taken another way:

“Innovation can come from anywhere, but you must be looking everywhere to find it.”

Innovation comes from good listening, observing, watching, waiting, connecting, and synthesizing.

Innovation comes from the creation of a unique, differentiated customer insight that you can build your ideation, your experimentation, your collaboration, and your commercialization efforts around. The goal of course is to turn that unique, differentiated insight into solutions valued above every existing alternative. Solutions that not only create value, but that you also stand ready and able to help people access and understand the need for and relevance in their life.

It is because innovation can come from anywhere and can involve everyone in the organization in making innovation happen that I created The Nine Innovation Roles and my innovation value framework, to help people make sense of what is necessary to make innovation successful as they form their innovation project teams and process, and to give people a simple framework to hold close as they think about creating innovation success.

I hope you’ll check out both of these and let me know what you think!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Brainstorming is More Than Ideation

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GUEST POST from Mitch Ditkoff

Most people think brainstorming sessions are all about ideas – much in the same way that Wall Street bankers think life is all about money.

While ideas are certainly a big part of brainstorming, they are only a part. People who rush into a brainstorming session starving for new ideas will miss the boat (and the train, car, and unicycle) completely unless they tune into the some other mighty important dynamics:

1. INVESTIGATION: If you want your brainstorming sessions to be effective, you’ll need to do some investigating before hand. Get curious. Ask questions. Dig deeper. The more you find out what the real issues are, the greater your chances of framing powerful questions to brainstorm and choosing the best techniques to use.

2. IMMERSION: While good ideas can surface at any time, their chances radically increase the more that brainstorm participants are immersed (i.e. focused). Translation? No coming and going during a session. No distractions. No interruptions. And don’t forget to put a “do not disturb” sign on the door.

3. INTERACTION: Ideas come to people at all times of day and under all kinds of circumstances. But in a brainstorming session, it’s the quality of interaction that makes the difference – how people connect with each other, how they listen, and build on ideas. Your job, as facilitator, is to increase the quality of interaction.

4. INSPIRATION: Creative output is often a function of mindset. Bored, disengaged people rarely originate good ideas. Inspired people do. This is one of your main tasks, as a brainstorm facilitator – to do everything in your power to keep participants inspired. The more you do, the less techniques you will need.

5. IDEATION: Look around. Everything you see began as an idea in someone’s mind. Simply put, ideas are the seeds of innovation – the first shape a new possibility takes. As a facilitator of the creative process, your job is to foster the conditions that amplify the odds of new ideas being conceived, developed, and articulated.

6. ILLUMINATION: Ideas are great. Ideas are cool. But they are also a dime a dozen unless they lead to an insight or aha. Until then, ideas are only two dimensional. But when the light goes on inside the minds of the people in your session, the ideas are activated and the odds radically increase of them manifesting.

7. INTEGRATION: Well-run brainstorming sessions have a way of intoxicating people. Doors open. Energy soars. Possibilities emerge. But unless participants have a chance to make sense of what they’ve conceived, the ideas are less likely to manifest. Opening the doors of the imagination is a good thing, but so is closure.

8. IMPLEMENTATION: Perhaps the biggest reason why most brainstorming sessions fail is what happens after – or, shall I say, what doesn’t happen after. Implementation is the name of the game. Before you let people go, clarify next steps, who’s doing what (and by when), and what outside support is needed.

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