Innovation Process Design

Architecting your innovation journey

We design and deploy results-oriented and scalable processes that allow you to reach your ambition. In designing your innovation process, we bring together our expertise in commercial capabilities and innovation, and our experience in deploying such processes at global innovation leaders.

What is innovation process design?

Designing an innovation process is not trivial for several reasons: (1) you typically need to onboard colleagues with diverse viewpoints and converge on complex choices; (2) you may have not had sufficient exposure to alternative process designs and, consequently, not thought about all the ins and outs (yet); (3) you may need guidance on to tailor the process to your needs and context. Over two decades, we have developed a method to successfully build your bespoke innovation process.

Our innovation process design methodology entails a series of meetings with your team to develop a vision of the process your want to implement, and clarify how you will achieve your objectives. This includes deciding on purpose (i.e., ambition and KPIs), people (i.e., participants and upskilling), governance (i.e., drumbeat, and selection), and innovation methods (i.e., tools and templates).

What does the innovation process design look like?

The innovation process design is typically a series of 2-4 workshops (1/2 day each). We follow an inspire-diverge-converge philosophy, namely:

  • Inspire: Cases and experiences we have lived
  • Diverge: Options on all design components
  • Converge: Recommendation and decision

We bring all the pieces together through our puzzle methodology, which we have perfected in last 20+ years of experience. Here we cover:

  • Purpose (why): The ambition we set
  • People (who): The talent we leverage
  • Governance (how): The way in which we manage
  • Methods (what): The tools and templates we use

For each piece of the puzzle, we have developed a series of questions. We include below a few examples:

  • Ambition: What strategic domain do you want to focus on? What type of innovations?
  • Participants: Who can participate and provide feedback? How much time can they dedicate?
  • Upskilling: What competences of participants do we need to develop?
  • Selection: What criteria do you use to select ideas? Who is part of the selection committee?

Based on your design choices we also bring our expertise in different methods in developing innovation. Below some examples of the methods we master.

Lear more about our tools here.

Benefits of innovation process design

The innovation process design trajectory will deliver a ready-to-implement process with all details ironed out. You will know the why, who, how, and what, together with an implementation roadmap (when). While there will always be obstacles along the way, designing a solid process with us means that you considered all options, and few things will surprise you. We will also share our prior experience so that you can find the most innovative and effective way to reach your ambition.