Design Thinking Or Lean Startup? Take A Hybrid Approach

The world of corporate innovation has transformed over the past several years. Of course it should. It’s innovation.

There are now so many different kinds of innovation: design innovation, business model innovation, digital innovation. And so many ways to organize for innovation: innovation labs, innovation centers, corporate accelerator programs.

More significantly, there has been a growth of two schools of thought in corporate innovation: Design Thinking and Lean Startup. Suddenly corporate innovators feel the need to be trained in both. But many consultancies practice or train in only one.

And wherever corporate innovators sit, there is growing pressure to be more entrepreneurial. More agile. To increase speed to market. To be more like that startup accelerator your boss visited.

The problem: Buzzwords and books are fine. But how do you actually be ‘agile’ in a corporate environment? New tools are good, but how can they actually make you more successful?

The best way to tackle this would be to learn about these new approaches, test them on real innovation projects, and then adapt them so that they’re really practical and work in corporations.

Sounds like a lot of work.

It was. Our team of 200+ inventors have been doing just that, so nobody else has to. We’ve tried, adapted, tested (and adapted again) the best new methods — spanning design thinking and lean startup — and seen what’s missing from each: the commercial strategy tools to help create the case for investment within established organizations (‘Agile Economics’), and the mindsets and behaviors that are critical to making innovation stick (‘Inventive Spirit’).

We’re launching it this week through a new subscription service for corporate innovators: The ?What If! Toolkit.

The ?What If! Toolkit is the on-demand service that gives innovation teams access to an ever-evolving toolkit of step-by-step guides, worked examples, templates and approaches to inventive ways of working. And The Learning Lab: a menu of cutting edge approaches to insight and experimentation. As well as on-demand access to expertise from our inventors and other corporate innovators.

Teams get access to the practical know how they need to invent through agile experimentation, and actually gain traction within their organization. It’s grounded in solving real, human problems that are strategically important — and fueled by the human behaviors, mindsets and values that it takes for innovation to take hold in established organizations.

The ?What If! Toolkit is the platform we use to keep our own inventors at the cutting edge, and it’s now available on a subscription basis — as well as alongside training, coaching and live innovation projects.

To schedule a demo of The ?What If! Toolkit, get in touch with us!