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IDEAS
IDEATION – MARKET SCANNING
No organization operates in a vacuum. All businesses have to take into account their larger environment, and it is a well‐established fact that this environment can have a significant impact on innovation (Jin,2000). While it is difficult to have a direct impact on these factors, it is important to scan and analyze them continuously in order to be aware of potential shifts or disruptive changes.
PESTLE is a strategic analytical technique to understand the impact of external, macro‐environmental factors on the organization. The model uses the analysis of opportunities or threats for the organization to identify new innovation possibilities. In addition, the model can help to analyze whether an innovation would be successful in the market. The external environment is investigated based on six dimensions: political, economic, sociological, technological, legal and environmental.
Porter’s 5 Forces
Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter (1979) developed a framework to scan the operating environment for organizations to analyze the attractiveness of businesses. The model offers a way of looking at an organization and the business in which the company operates to analyze all forces that work against this business.
IDEATION – PROBLEM DEFINITION
Problem mapping is a technique used to analyze a main problem (McAdam,2004). Ideas and the way they connect to the main problem are then raised, resulting in a larger and more complex map. The process then focuses on developing a method to solve the raised issues systematically.
The main success with this model is that it helps in focusing the idea generation on the main problem by identifying all the relevant factors and their relationships. Also, the method triggers coming up with solutions. However, the main difficulty is that there are usually no real boundaries between problems (or constituent problems), so it might therefore take a very long time to map out the entire problem area (Weisberg,1999).
1H5W is a powerful questioning technique that focuses on answering the questions “what?”, “who?”, “where?”, “when?”, “why?” and “how?”. By focusing on these questions, the method seeks to identify all the elements and potentially the root cause of the problem and as a consequence, make the solution show up (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992). The focus on questions offers a comprehensive approach to understanding problems, which makes the approach very popular in businesses.
1H5W is particularly applicable when participants already possess sufficient knowledge of the domain under consideration and there is a need for a thorough elaboration of the domain.
Mind Mapping
The mind mapping technique was popularized during the 1960s by Tony Buzan as a superior way to visualize information, starting from a central concept and flaring out to several “tentacles” based on associated concepts. The mind map focuses on just one idea or concept at a time.
The validation for this way of representation is that a visual, parallel representation of concepts is more in line with the way we visually process information than the serial notation you find in regular written text. Creating a mind map allows for some brainstorming which can also be done individually (e.g. when no other team members are available).
IDEATION – IDEA GENERATION & CAPTURE
Brain Storming
Brainstorming was first proposed by Osborn in his book “Applied Imagination” in 1953. Since then the technique has known many improvements.
Brainstorming combines a relaxed, informal approach to problem solving with lateral thinking. It encourages people to come up with thoughts and ideas that can, at first, seem a bit crazy. It is important and necessary to forget all existing assumptions and assumed limitations.
Some of the generated ideas can be transformed into creative solutions to a problem, while others can be a starting point for other ideas. The most important rule within the brainstorming technique is the fact that people should avoid criticizing or rewarding ideas until after a certain amount of them have been generated.
Brain Writing
Brain writing, in contrast to brainstorming, does not require people to yell out ideas in public. Brain writing therefore avoids some of the main pitfalls of brainstorming.
Role Storming
During brainstorming sessions it is not about the quality of the ideas but about the quantity. During the idea assessment phase, the best ideas will be separated from the poorer ones. However, people often refrain from saying everything they think because they are afraid of not being taken seriously. Unfortunately, it is this creativity that leads to the best solutions.
Role storming, which is an evolution of brainstorming, overcomes this problem by providing people with a new identify before starting a brainstorming session. The rationale is that this new identity takes away the potential embarrassment that might inhibit participants in a brainstorming session. Also, shy or less assertive people might feel empowered to speak up. The technique was developed by Griggs (1985) and described by Van Gundy (1988).
Besides allowing people to speak without embarrassment, it makes people view problems and solutions from a different standpoint which might trigger new ideas. It helps people to come up with ideas that they may not have otherwise considered.
Random Word
The random word technique helps to avoid the typical problem of sticking to existing solutions and assumptions.
The technique, which is probably the simplest idea generation technique, is based on randomly generated words. These random words tend to take people away from their comfort zone into a completely unrelated area. It provides people with a new entry point to start thinking about a certain topic. The random word method was developed by Edward de Bono in 1968.
Opportunity Redefinition
The goal of the opportunity redefinition technique is to see an opportunity in different ways. By replacing three important words in the problem (or objective) statement with different alternatives, new opportunities might arise. Even though often the new opportunities might not make sense, they will trigger new ideas.
Lateral Thinking
Lateral thinking is another very popular technique of idea generation that can be applied by an individual. The process was developed and popularized by de Bono (de Bono, 1970).
According to de Bono, creativity is not just about putting a group of people into a room and have them brainstorming. The avoidance of judgement, ignorance and innocence all contribute to a certain level of “natural creativity” but, although is it found to be useful in e.g. advertising, it is often not sufficient to come up with useful and working ideas. To de Bono, creativity is an unnatural and active process.
People tend to think according to known patterns and within certain boundaries. Lateral thinking is about actively changing these pieces of information and breaking assumptions. Think about the breakthrough when realizing the earth was a sphere. To achieve this, one had to let go of the assumption that the earth was flat.
Lateral thinking helps people cutting across thinking patterns and routines. De Bono (1995) proposed multiple tools and techniques to help people in the lateral thinking process. Examples are the six thinking hats, random word generation, provocation, etc.
Scamper
The SCAMPER technique is a method to generate innovative ideas which was developed by Bob Eberle in the 70’s. It is based on the idea that everything new is a modification of something that already exists.
The model consists of a set of questions grouped into seven categories. The questions are aimed at playing with the characteristics of the product, service, process, etc. which you are having problems with or which you are trying to improve. The questions are directed at adding or modifying something that already exists.
SCAMPER is an acronym for Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Magnify/modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate and Rearrange/reverse, which group the questions into seven categories.
180 Degree Thinking
The most restraining factor to creativity is the fact that people are usually slaves to assumptions about how things ought to be.
The 180 degree thinking technique helps to take your mind away from these predictable and restraining patterns. The technique achieves this by assuming the exact opposite of traditional assumptions to change the direction of thinking. In this way, it results in fresh ideas. The 180 degree thinking technique is similar to “Questioning assumptions” from Mattimore (2012).
It is important to note that within the 180 degree thinking method, the resulting idea does not have to be 180 degrees different from the original assumptions. The most important thing is to start the thinking process with opposite assumptions and build new ideas based on that.
Six Thinking Hats
This ideation technique identifies six distinct modes of thinking (represented by colored hats) about concepts. These modes (or ways of thinking about things) are: Managing, Information, Emotions, Discrement, Optimistic and Creativity
The goal of the six thinking hats is to direct the participants of a session in their thinking process by forcing one mode of thinking. After a while, that mode of thinking is changed (putting on a different hat). In this way the problem is tackled from different angles in a structured way, rather than haphazard. Using this method, one can avoid the “spaghetti thinking” that is prevalent in western cultures (where one person thinks e.g. about the benefits, while another about something unrelated such as “materials used”). (Bono, 1999)
Questioning Assumptions
One of the inhibitors to innovation is the fact that industries hold on to how things are and should be done. These assumptions sometimes preclude people from thinking outside of the box.
The “questioning assumptions” technique is about systematically questioning the assumptions made. The topics of these assumptions can be manifold, e.g. customer beliefs, material usage, pricing, distribution, marketing, etc.
This technique is strongly related to the “180 degree thinking” method. The “180 degree thinking” method helps you to come up with creative solutions by assuming the exact opposite of traditional assumptions.
Semantic Intuition
The semantic intuition method is a word-combination technique that was invented by Helmut Schlicksupp in the 1970s. The main idea behind this technique is the fact that the first step in innovation is to come up with a name for an idea. Afterwards, based on the name, one has to try to figure out what the new idea might be. The names are created by generating a list of words and then randomly combining these lists.
The technique is often used by artists, like e.g. Sting, who sometimes first gets a title for a song and only afterwards actually writes it. The technique can also be used to gather innovative ideas in product development, new promotions, etc.
This technique can be used to revive a brainstorming session that is losing steam.
Know Brainer
The KnowBrainer technique is a card set developed by Gerald Haman. The card set consists of four phases which are based on Haman’s four-phase accelerated innovation process. Each phase contains questions, pictures, nouns, verbs and quotes. The goal of the cards is to guide people though an innovation process by invoking responses to the cards. The questions, words and pictures have been carefully selected to trigger ideas.
Picture Prompts
The picture prompts technique makes use of the characteristic of pictures to generate strong emotions, which often sets off the creative thinking processes.
In this technique, the participants should write down ideas that come naturally when seeing the picture.
Problem interviewing is a useful technique for understanding the worldview of a relevant customer before formulating a detailed product solution. Different elements of product, market and customer risk are carefully evaluated using the approach:
- Product risk: are the problem(s) you're solving of a priority to your target customers?
- Market risk: does competition exist, and how do customers solve these problems today?
- Customer risk: who exactly has the pain (i.e. is this a viable customer segment?)
A key advantage is that it allows customer pains/problems to be tested, identified and prioritised before detailed investment is made in product development.
Revolutionary Idea Generation
An evolutionary idea is an idea that breaks away from traditional thought and creates a brand new perspective. The difference between a revolutionary idea and an evolutionary idea is explained by Harris (2012) by a simple example: imagine a professor who is trying to improve his lectures. An evolutionary idea might be to use PowerPoint slides instead of a using the whiteboard. A revolutionary idea might be to have the students teach each other.
Synectics
Synectics is a way to approach creativity and problem-solving in a rational way. According to Gordon, people can be better at being creative if they understand how creativity works. Gordon derived the Synectics technique from recording (initially audio, later video) meetings, analyzing the results and experimenting with alternative ways of dealing with the obstacles in the meeting. Synectics is a big bag of tricks for idea generation.
Triggered Brain walking
The triggered brainwalking technique is a standing brainstorming exercise. The exercise consists of several rounds of idea generation where the teams rotate between so-called “ideation stations”. The technique is very similar to the brainwriting technique. The main difference is the fact that in brainwalking, it is not the piece of paper that is moving around the room, but the participants themselves.
TRIZ
TRIZ stands for “Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch”, which is Russian for “The theory of inventive problem solving (TIPS)”. The method was developed by Altshuller, G. S. between 1946 and 1985.
Compared to other idea generation techniques, TRIZ is based on the study of patterns of problems and solutions instead of creativity. Within TRIZ, more than three million patents have been analyzed for the discovery of patterns (mindtools.com, N.A.).
Wishing
The wishing technique stimulates creativity by making the most extraordinary wishes for your business without placing any limitations in terms of budget, time, resources, etc. The wishes can, and perhaps should, be impossible to realize. By doing this, the technique helps to challenge basic assumptions and limitations to be able create fresh ideas.
Worst Idea
Within the worst idea technique, the facilitator asks the group to come up with really bad and silly ideas that would never work or are even illegal. The technique is valuable during brainstorming sessions for multiple reasons which are further explained in the information sheet.
IDEATION – IDEA ASSESSMENT
Action Priority Matrix
Organizations rarely have the time to implement all ideas on their wish list. Therefore they need techniques to support them in selecting the right ideas to make efficient and effective use of their time. If ideas are prioritized wisely, organizations can spend more time on high-value ideas.
Prioritization is a general technique to order ideas based on their value and viability. The action priority matrix is a prioritization technique most suitable for complex cases. In this technique, the value of an idea is plotted against the effort required.
- ActionPriorityMatrix.zip
Consensus Mapping
The aim of the consensus mapping technique is to make a team of participants arrive at a shared image of the problem at hand and the activities required to implement a possible solution. First, one or more ideas should be brainstormed as input for the exercise. Then, for each idea, 20-30 activities (per idea) are sequenced over time into a useable plan of action. The focus is on the interrelationship, sequence and synergies of the activities. The technique is also useful for project planning.
- ConsensusMapping.zip
Cost Benefit Analysis
The cost-benefit analysis is a widely used and simple approach to evaluate ideas. Within this analysis, the costs are weighed against the benefits. The outcome, which results from subtracting the costs from the benefits, is used to prioritize ideas.
- CostBenefitAnalysis.zip
Delphi Method
This approach attempts to reach a consensus over which idea is the best to pursue. The Delphi method relies heavily on the opinion of individual experts. Experts (individually) answer questionnaires. After their answers are summarized by the facilitator, the experts are given the opportunity to revise their answers from the previous round based on these (anonymized) responses. This process stops after a pre‐defined number of rounds or after a certain consensus has been reached.
For the assessment of a new product, it might be interesting to make an estimation of the adoption rate of the product and the potential number of products sold per year. The ATAR method provides a structured approach for this estimation.
This pretest model, based on the “diffusion of innovation theory” allows a business to estimate the percentage of the population that might become a regular customer. ATAR is an acronym that stands for Awareness Trial Availability Repeat. Once one knows the chance for each of these stages of familiarity with a product, one can calculate the actual chance of a random person becoming a regular customer.
AHP-Based Approach
When assessing an idea, often, multiple criteria have to be taken into account (quality, cost, timing, complexity, etc.). Some criteria are more important and should be given more consideration than others. When there are more than a few items on the assessment list, it gets hard to keep all the prioritization considerations in one’s mind at the same time.
The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions and for representing and quantifying its elements and evaluating the alternatives.
The approach also assists in evaluating the consistency of the judgment.
ABC Analysis
In the ABC analysis, ideas are listed in a table according to their importance. What “importance” means has to be defined beforehand. “A” items are very important, “B” items are somewhat important and “C” items are only marginally important. Only the A items get through the filter to the next subtheme.
The ABC technique can be used in the idea assessment phase in two different ways:
• Grouping of ideas into the three categories;
• Grouping the characteristics of a single idea into the A, B or C category.
Anonymous Voting
The anonymous voting technique is a technique to make a selection from a large amount of ideas.
The anonymity of the participants makes this group technique particularly useful for groups where there is a lot of internal pressure or anxiety.
The disadvantage of this technique is that it is very subjective, since it is based solely on the opinion of the participants. Also, within this technique it is not clear which criteria the participants use when ranking the ideas. Therefore, it is mainly used during early phases of idea assessment and selection.
Grid Matrix Analysis
The grid matrix analysis has a lot of different names, like e.g. decision matrix, evaluation matrix, weighted criteria matrix, etc.
The grid matrix analysis helps to select one alternative based on a set of criteria. The technique visualizes the decision in a matrix. Each evaluation criterion is given a weight. In addition, each alternative is scored for each of the criteria. By multiplying these scores with the assigned weight and adding the scores per alternative, one can determine the most valued solution.
The technique is most suite for decisions where one already has a set of good alternatives to choose from.
Force Field Analysis
In innovation, many ideas fail. The reason for this is because often the different (negative) forces are not taken into account. The force field analysis is a easy to use technique that takes into account this risk.
The force field analysis technique was created by Kurt Lewin in the 1940s. It is a group technique in which group members identify and list two types of forces: forces in favor of the idea (driving forces), and forces against the idea (restraining forces). These identified forces are often the result of a brainstorming session. In most cases, the facilitator will visually represent the impact and strength of each of the forces.
Once the different forces (and their strength) have been identified, the overview can be used in two ways. Firstly, one can decide whether or not to go ahead with the idea (go/no-go decision). Secondly, the graph could help increasing the chances of success by strengthening the driving forces and neutralizing the restraining forces.
SWOT
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is a widely adopted method to evaluate products, industries, organizations, and may also be used to evaluate ideas. Its goal is to identify internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to monetize an idea. The general idea is to assess the strengths of the idea, its weaknesses, as well as investigating if other opportunities or threats exist in the landscape which may cause an idea to be more powerful than another idea.
Checklist for business idea evaluation
A checklist can be used to assess the usefulness and viability of an idea very quickly and easily. Various simple checklists have been produced over the years.
The checklists allow managers to assess ideas by thinking about costs, benefits, limitations, risks, etc. This evaluation can be done individually or in group.
Kepner Tregoe Matrix
The Kepner Tregoe matrix method is an efficient and systematic framework for decision making, developed by Charles H. Kepner and Benjamin B. Tregoe in the 1960s. By focusing on risk assessment and prioritization, the method aims at achieving the outcome with the least negative consequences. The Kepner Tregoe matrix approach guides you through setting objectives, prioritizing alternatives, exploring the weaknesses of the different alternatives, and choosing the final "best" solution. Finally, the method advices you to generate plans to prepare for problems that might occur as a consequence of the decision made.
FMEA
FMEA stands for Failure Mode(s) and Effects analysis and was originally developed in the 1950s as a military quality management technique. The key purpose of this method is to identify as many potential failures as possible within a product or process to define the actions to be taken to eliminate or reduce these failures from occurring. The goal is to identify these problems early in the development cycle because it is easier (and less expensive) to take action early.
Potential failures are prioritized based on three dimensions: (1) Seriousness of the consequences, (2) Frequency of occurrence and (3) Detectability. This allows the team to focus on the highest-priority failures.
Idea Advocate
The idea advocate technique is most appropriate when a pre-selection of ideas has already been made, and only a few ideas are still in the running. Each of the remaining ideas is presented by an advocate who will defend the idea in front of a jury. Then, the jury eliminates ideas until only one is left. Possibly, multiple elimination rounds are required.
In NAF, every idea is given a score between 1 and 10 for three criteria: Novelty, Attractiveness, and Feasibility. All three scores are then added and the ideas are ranked according to their total score. The technique is very simple, and is thus often used in the process of idea selection and/or idea ranking.
Nominal Group Technique
With this technique, people work in each other’s presence but start with writing down ideas independently. This process eliminates early idea evaluation and criticism. After the idea generation process, the ideas are ranked based on an anonymous voting, followed by a final discussion.
The main advantages of the nominal group technique are the anonymity of the participants and the equal participation amongst the members. This makes the technique suitable for groups that are not used to interact or groups with high tension levels or large status differences.
CONCEPTUALIZATION
Prototyping is an iterative and visual process to gather user requirements about what a system should do and what it should look like.
The goal of prototyping is to create a quick mock‐up of the future state of a system, which leads to a couple of advantages.
The new concept also needs to be assessed for feasibility. The feasibility assessment will prove a valuable input for the portfolio management activity. Even the best idea may still fail, in case it is just not feasible to put it in production, or in case the market is not (yet) ready for it. Feasibility consists of four areas: market, technology, organizational and financial.
PORTOFOLIO MANAGEMENT
The Estimated Commercial Value (ECV) method values the investment one step-at-a-time via a decision tree approach. The method is most often used for new product development projects. This method looks at risks and probabilities and allows for risk mitigation via options-buying. Therefore, the method will value venturesome projects much more fairly. According to the options approach, there should not be a go/no-go decision in the early stages of the project. Instead, the decision should be whether or not a relatively small investment should be made to undertake some more investigation. The idea-to-launch process should be seen as “buying a series of options”.
There is a shortage of breakthrough projects in today’s business environment. This is mostly due to the overreliance on financial methods, which favor incremental projects with a more reliable financial forecast. This (too) high amount of small, incremental projects results in a failure to reserve strategic resources to fuel innovative initiatives.
Therefore, there is a need for different toolsets to make room for innovation projects. One of these tools is the business strategy method, also known as the strategic buckets.
The strategic bucket method is a top-down method, in which the business strategy is the starting point of the portfolio management. The organization defines several strategic domains (or “buckets”) that are relevant to the company, and divides the projects among these buckets. This ensures that the business strategy is reflected within the project portfolio.
It is remarkable that organizations often still struggle with monetizing value from innovation projects. This is due to the fact that most businesses have far too many projects, and often the wrong ones. There is a need for a funneling process, where at every stage, where new information is gathered, a certain percentage of initial ideas/projects is cut.
In practice, a majority of the (go/no-go) decisions are based on financial approaches (like e.g. Net Present Value, Return on Investment, Payback Period, etc.). These financial methods will always select the more incremental and known projects instead of innovative ideas whose financial forecast is not as predictable. One of the solutions to diversify this mostly incremental project portfolio with more groundbreaking ideas, is the use of scoring models for the evaluation of ideas in early-stage portfolio reviews.
Cooper (2003) studied the major project success factors and found that “go/kill decision points” are often the weakest element of all innovation process factors studied. Therefore, this topic should deserve sufficient attention.
The main idea of scoring models is the following. The organization selects a couple of criteria based on which the different ideas/projects will be scored. The total score is calculated by means of a simple or a weighted sum. This final score can be used to make a prioritization and selection of projects to take to the next stage.
Business Model
According to Osterwalder, Pigneur and Smith (Osterwalder, Pigneur, & Smith, 2010) a business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. This is represented by mapping out the nine basic building blocks that show how the organization works: key partners, key activities, key resources, cost centers, value proposition, customer relationship, channels and clients.
The main advantage of a business model innovation is that it looks beyond the traditional product or process innovation. Instead, the model helps identifying and building strategies to enhance the business flexibility, create barriers to imitation and reduce costs. By mapping out the nine building blocks, the model allows the identification of value creation opportunities, e.g. by taking full advantage of the strategic partners, resources, channels and activities at its disposal to align customer’s needs with company offerings.
In bubble diagrams, also known as portfolio maps, projects are placed on an X-Y map, denoting specific properties, e.g. “risk” on one axis and “reward” on the other. More properties can be added to the scheme e.g. varying bubble sizes to indicate the size of the project or different colors to indicate types of projects. The use of more than three dimensions into one chart becomes often too complex. Therefore, it should be easy to switch properties easily to build new graphs to be able to take into account more than three variables in the project selection process.
For Kinnunen et al. (2011) business case development involves four components: market-related, technical and financial information and the inclusion of strategy. Cooper (2001) incorporates the business case analysis in the stage gate model to assess and screen the potential of a given innovation before every stage or phase.
PRODUCT
PROJECT PLANNING
Status Report
A project status report is a formalized overview of the current status of a project within the project plan. It is reported regularly to the stakeholders of the project to inform them about the project’s progress, risks, issues, decisions to be made, etc.
This concise report allows for the project stakeholders, who are less involved in the project, to ‘manage by exception’. They are provided with high‐level information about the project to be able to ask the correct questions (if necessary) and to make the best decisions possible.
The project status repot can also be used to keep track of the history of a project, e.g. to gather lessons learned when closing the project.
Lessons Learned
Different project management methodologies, like e.g. Prince2 and PMBOK recommend the creation of a lessons learned log. The purpose of creating a lessons learned log is to use the knowledge derived from past experienced in future projects.
When the lessons learned are gathered and communicated in an effective way throughout the organization, the organization can learn from the mistakes made in the past. It is important to mention that not only the problems or failures should be documented. Also the successes should be logged, so they can be reproduced in the future.
Change Request Register
Different project management methodologies, like e.g. Prince2 or PMBOK, recommend the use of a change management strategy. Besides the process which determines the different phases of approval, a definition of roles and responsibilities, there is also a need for a change request log. Within this log, a logical record of all change requests throughout the lifecycle of the project are registered, together with their status.
The main advantages of this change request log is the fact that it helps you to assess how many of the proposed changes where actually implemented into your project plan and whether or not they delivered what they promised in terms of the benefits.
Decision Document
Obviously, making good and fast decisions is a very important factor in the successful delivery of projects. However, projects are often delayed because of delays in decision making. The cause of these delays are mostly related to the fact that the decision makers don’t have (easy) access to the required information.
To avoid this, Benesh (2013) introduces a decision making framework which focuses on the importance of a clearly communicated and agreed upon decision making process and decision document. Within the framework, it should be clear who can make decisions related to which topics.
PROCESS
Lean Canvas
In the past decade, the “Lean” movement made an impact on the way businesses bring new products to market. Initially, the Lean concept was referring to the manufacturing approaches but in more recent years, these Lean principles have been applied to other parts of industry and business. A prime example is the “Lean Startup” movement which is valuable to innovation in the wide sense as well.
The core idea that “Lean” is about is the avoidance of waste in every aspect of the process. In terms of innovation this means that the sooner the organization learns, and subsequently acts on that knowledge, the smaller the “waste”.
The Lean canvas, developed by Maurya (2012), provides a practical approach to engage in Lean innovation. It is a format for brainstorming possible business models.
Innovation Maturity Model
For an organization to achieve successful innovation, it must create a particular set of capabilities. Gartner developed the Innovation Maturity Model as a useful tool to manage an organization’s innovation maturity. The higher an organization’s innovation maturity, the larger the benefits achieved through innovation.
The tool allows an understanding of the current state of organizational innovation on one hand and an understanding of the actions needed to move to higher levels of capability on the other hand.
PEMM
The PEMM, which stands for Process and Enterprise Maturity Model, was developed by Hammer (2007). This model does not only take into account the maturity of the processes within the organizations. They articulate that designing and redesigning business processes involves more than rearranging workflows. The process (re)design should be supported by well-trained personnel, a supportive culture, aligned information systems, etc. Therefore, PEMM defined two sets of dimensions to be scored: the process enablers and the enterprise capabilities. The enterprise capabilities relate to the readiness of the enterprise for designing and sustaining high performing processes.
Build-Measure-Learn Cycle
Eric Ries developed the Lean Startup approach, offering a process for the development of new products, countering the prejudice that “Lean” has to be cheap and without guidance of any process. One of the core components of the lean startup approach is the build-measure-learn loop. This feedback loop forms the process that Ries envisions for a lean startup.
Innovation Compass Diagnostic Tool
Radnor and Noke (2002) developed the Innovation Compass diagnostic tool which is a self-audit diagnostic tool for innovation and new product development.
The tool serves two main goals. In the first place the tools allows the benchmarking of an organization’s innovation maturity against industry’s average and/or best practices. Secondly, the results can be used to develop an action plan for improving the organization’s innovation performance.
MARKET
Economic Incentives for Horizontal Market Analysis
This template serves as a guide for the analysis of the cyber-security or privacy market, a start-up or an established company wants to enter with a new product. While many smaller companies will not be able to conduct an in-depth and broad market analysis, this template will still be informative, once some brainstorming has been conducted with respect to the key aspects considered in the template.
Economic Incentives for Vertical Market Analysis
This Template serves as a guide for the analysis of the vertical relations in privacy or cyber-security markets. Vertical relations describe the relationships of firms at different levels of the production chain (e.g. some acting as input suppliers, others as buyers of these inputs and sellers of final output products). While many smaller companies will not be able to conduct an in-depth vertical analysis, this template will still be informative once some brainstorming has been conducted on the key aspects considered in the template.
Economic Incentives for Operational Market Analysis
This IPACSO Template serves as a guide for the analysis of the operational environment for a cyber-security or privacy firm. Operational environment describes the general environment in which the company operates in (see also IPACSO Deliverable 5.1), but not to be confused with the PESTLE analysis (also provided on the IPACSO website). While many smaller companies will not be able to conduct an in-depth operational environment analysis, this template will still be informative once some brainstorming has been conducted on the key aspects considered in the template.
(the following templates can be downloaded upon registration to the platform and after logging into the system. The whole list is also available on from the download page : http://ipacso.eu/downloads/category/22-template-packages.html?download=161:ipacso-all-templates)
