🟢 Adapting your innovation process to different team cultures
Today it's all about a more nuanced and practical discussion on how to apply innovation frameworks depending on which type of team culture you're dealing with. And because we never have much time in innovation, let's boil it down to three types of culture.
The business model framework we've been using for many years and refined along ways always had the same priority: make it as simple as possible to keep innovators' priorities straight.
It's not about simplicity but about focus
These priorities are essentially about being able to understand and explain the problem you're solving (and incidentally, who's having the most pain currently), how much value you intend to bring in to change the market (and how much this should be worth), and lastly, what is the product that is going to deliver the value.
With every critical piece of information on your innovation project on the same dashboard, it gets easier to focus on testing these assumptions and getting to product-market fit ASAP. Or to pivot and adjust in real-time without spending hours with sticky notes on a wall, or god-forbid, rewriting a business plan.
Does one size fit all?
One critical step that is always missed is that whether you're a startup or a large multinational, innovation projects rarely fit this perfect logic of finding the market's problem first, then designing for value, and selecting only the necessary product to get the job done. Mostly, teams rush in with a magical product and technology and try to cram it down the market's throat. Often, trained as engineers or scientists, they walk in this beautiful, simple pathway of getting to the problem first 100% backward. Not even all of them do that. Some other projects just always want to talk about their vision. The new paradigm they want to build and how they want to disrupt things. All this, with, at best, a very poor idea about the market's real problems and, somehow, even worse, how they will do it (lately, the magical unicorn dust is AI).
