The Innovation Frame™A New Model for Making Innovation Happen

The Innovation Frame™ (TIF) is a model for managing and practicing innovation on any scale. It is meant to allow users to start simple with innovation as a high-level concept, but allow them to “drill down” to further detail as advanced applications are desired. TIF’s architecture is similar and complementary to the Business Model Canvas® (Osterwalder, et al), and although it uses some different categories and nomenclature, each can work either in concert with or completely independently from the other.

The Innovation Frame ComponentsTIF is an independent eco-system of innovation-specific components (see also, image below):

1. Stakeholders – The various categories of organizations and/or individuals, which are sufficiently relevant, that they must be recognized and considered within the system.

2. Resources – Any and all assets, whether tangible or intangible, that are available (or are reasonably accessible from) within the system, that have the potential to help create new value.

3. Associations – Connections between two stakeholders, between stakeholders and resources, or between two resources, along which elements of value can be exchanged.

4. Values – The prioritized set of internal determinants of worth or importance within each stakeholder, impacting needs/problems, and influencing his/her/its rational decision-making.

5. Tools – The instruments, techniques, models, and insights utilized within the innovation process. These include both legacy and newly-emerging tools.

6. Formulas – A particular set of recipe-like uses and approaches for both tools and resources. Formulas are generic ways of applying tools to resources to create new value for stakeholders.

7. Iterations – The basic cyclical process of experimentation, consisting of four phases (STEP™: Strategy, Trial, Error, Perception), used within the innovation system.

8. Mindsets – The cognitive attitudes, assumptions, perspectives, orientations, cultures, and habits that characterize one or more stakeholders (including the innovator) at any given time.

9. Canvas – (optional) The platform upon which all business model components are arranged and represented, analogous to a blueprint, a diagram, a desktop, or a map (i.e. “landscape”).

10. Dictionary – The documentation of all TIF components, including a listing of stakeholders, the annotation of resources, schedules of stakeholders’ values (and their prioritizations), an inventory of recipes and tools, the status of mindsets (including explicitly stated assumptions), and all activities, observations, insights, and changes in value. It also contains background information and instructions for utilizing TIF, and working definitions of basic terms.

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The Innovation Frame™A New Model for Making Innovation Happen

The Innovation Frame ProcessThe way that TIF is used depends upon the particular type of innovation challenge at hand. Starting with the typical scenario, you are the innovator, trying to solve a problem for one specific stakeholder. With this in mind, TIF would suggest the following as your process (as with all portions of this approach, consider repeatedly revisiting, refining, and adding to each step as you continuously learn and better understand elements of TIF):

A. Define the problem by writing a problem statement; refine this iteratively over time. B. Identify all key stakeholders (first by category, then individually).C. Understand the values (positioning) of each stakeholder, by each one’s priorities.D. Identify all available resources that could possibly be used in your innovation process.E. Consider which formula(s) to use for various resources, tools, and/or stakeholders.F. Utilize the STEP™ cycle to iteratively experiment with formula applications.G. Observe and measure the impacts of the formula applications.H. Continue until sufficient value is created.I. Include the use of additional tools, participants, iterations as needed.J. Represent action steps/impacts upon canvas or component areas.K. Document throughout within the dictionary.

The Innovation Frame Guidelines & Insights You can use TIF to any degree of formality you choose. You can substitute your own tools or other components within TIF as you see fit. For example in

addition to Formulas, you can utilize techniques such as SCAMPER and TRIZ. It is recommended that you use a variety of tools throughout the process. For example, every

time you are to “identify” a stakeholder or resource or “select” a tool or formula, this is an opportunity to utilize a brainstorming tool. Likewise, when trying to understand stakeholder values, you may want to utilize an innovation-related assessment, survey tool, or anthropological observations. Also, while reflecting during the STEP™ cycle, this would be one opportunity to utilize the Cubie™ dimensional inquiry model.

TIF doesn’t seek one final/static model; it seeks multiple options through repeated iteration. The “magic” is not in the model

itself (TIF), but in how you use it.

Unlike the Business Model Canvas (BMC), TIF does not presume that value is being created for one or more customers; rather that value can be created by and for any combination of stakeholders. In this case, “customers” would simply be one type of stakeholder (“key partners” would be another). Similarly, while BMC has “costs” and “revenues,” TIF simplifies these down to merely one example each of positive and negative value, which flows both ways along the associations between and among stakeholders. Formulas are analogous to abstracted “key activities.”

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