Models that make innovation tractable
A working library of the frameworks, theories, and decision tools we lean on with clients. Each one comes with the question it answers and the situation it suits.
How to build new things, in order
Process frameworks for moving an idea from sketch to scale. Each is a sequence: where to start, what to commit, when to kill it.
Three Horizons
Allocate effort and capital across today’s core business, the next adjacent bets, and tomorrow’s option space. Useful when leadership is starving the future to feed the present.
Portfolio strategyStage-Gate
A disciplined funnel of go/kill decisions between ideation and launch. It only works if the gate criteria are real. Most stage-gates fail because nobody actually kills anything at the gate.
Product developmentLean Startup
Build, Measure, Learn loops on top of validated learning. Use it when you don’t yet know whether the customer wants what you think they want. Don’t use it when you’re scaling something that already works.
New venturesDesign Thinking
Empathize → Define → Ideate → Prototype → Test. A methodology for human-centered problem framing. Gets misused as “let’s run a workshop”. Used well, it surfaces the problem worth solving.
Discovery workJobs To Be Done
Customers don’t buy products. They hire them to make progress on a job. Reframes segmentation around outcomes instead of demographics. Hardest part is naming the job at the right altitude.
Customer researchWardley Mapping
Plot every component of your value chain by maturity, from genesis to commodity. Reveals where to build, buy, or invest, and which battles aren’t yours to fight. Underrated in mainstream strategy.
Capability strategyEffectuation
A decision logic for acting under genuine uncertainty. Start with means at hand (who you are, what you know, who you know), set affordable loss instead of expected return, treat surprises as new inputs rather than failures.
Venture decisionsHoshin Kanri
Strategy deployment from the Japanese lean tradition. Cascade a small number of north-star objectives into operational metrics and improvement projects via an X-shaped matrix. Works when leadership has the strategy right but execution drifts away from it.
Strategy deploymentWhy innovations succeed and fail
A handful of theories that explain market behavior better than any others. Read these once, and most “what’s happening here?” conversations become a lot shorter.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
Why well-managed incumbents lose to insurgents who underperform on the metrics that matter today. The lesson: being good enough on a new dimension beats being better on the old one.
Incumbents under threatDiffusion of Innovations
The S-curve and the five adopter segments. Explains why early traction with enthusiasts so rarely translates to mass adoption, and what tends to bridge the gap.
Adoption strategyCrossing the Chasm
Operationalises Rogers for technology markets. The chasm between early adopters and pragmatists has to be jumped with a beachhead, not a broad platform.
Tech go-to-marketBlue Ocean Strategy
Stop competing inside red oceans of feature parity; create new market space by reframing the value curve. The “Eliminate / Reduce / Raise / Create” grid is the most useful single tool.
DifferentiationQuick instruments we keep nearby
Smaller models that come up week after week. Useful when you need to size up a situation in the back of a notebook.
Kano Model
Categorises features as basic, performance, or delight. Tells you which improvements raise satisfaction and which are table stakes. Most product roadmaps over-invest on the wrong category.
Feature prioritizationFive Forces
Industry structure shapes profit pools. Useful as a 30-minute audit when entering a market, or when an existing one is changing under you. Less useful as a static deck slide.
Market entryCynefin Framework
Sorts problems into clear, complicated, complex, or chaotic, and prescribes the right response for each. Stops teams from applying best-practice playbooks to genuinely novel problems.
Problem framingPre-mortem
Imagine the project has failed; work backward through the causes. A short pre-mortem at kickoff catches more risk than weeks of formal risk registers, because it gives people permission to be pessimistic.
Risk surfacingWant this applied in a workshop?
We run half-day and full-day sessions on these models, tuned to the strategic question you’re actually asking. Bring the team, walk out with a working framework.
See workshop formats Get in touch