Take your corporate innovation from zero to hero in 5 days, with a 9 Diamond Config Sprint
Written by Jef Cavens, Anastasia Khusid, Floris Schoenmakers, and Stephan Spijkers
Innovate or die? Lessons learned from a big innovation failure
Remember BlackBerry, the ultimate smartphone of the mobile prehistory era? Before iPhone, before Android, BlackBerry was the one that had contracts with the major carriers, best email service, highest security standards, and smoothest text-input method. The same company, that completely ignored the industry trend of moving to bigger touch-screens. BlackBerry was so busy serving millions of existing customers, that they totally missed out on the billions that were potentially to come. The outcome? The graph below says it all.
Now, BlackBerry was of course still trying to innovate and they did. However, those attempts were coming from misleading insights and extreme confidence that there is plenty of time. Thus, BlackBerry believed that Adobe’s Flash technology would be the future of rich mobile content. Furthermore, they decided to postpone the launch of a spec-competitive smartphone until it had a chip with enough power to handle the requirements of Flash. Just to give you a feeling of a race speed among mobile companies, at exactly the same time the dual-core processor was released, and LG was so prompt to implement it, that they even received a Guinness World Record. Meanwhile “BlackBerry believed that people would wait for its superior product, or would put up with limitations, because, well, it’s BlackBerry.” (Svov)
So what are the lessons to be learned from this case? Obviously the formula ‘innovate or die’ is not enough anymore. Now it’s ‘innovate fast, or die.’ Approaching innovations in a traditional corporate way — spending months on consultancy, perfecting your idea, and launching it years after (if at all) — is a recipe for failure. As well as getting into innovations, without first defining why and how. An informed innovation vision is a crucial condition for success.
Get started now! Launch your vision-driven corporate innovation
So how do you start with corporate innovation in a fast-paced vision-driven manner? At oneUp, we do this through a 5-day Config Sprint. The Config Sprint is the launching engine of the 9 Diamond Framework, an action-driven hands-on approach to disruptive and radical corporate innovation. The framework provides organizations with a tangible setup for the most effective innovation management and execution.
The Config Sprint follows the same dynamic principles as Google’s Design Sprint. Thus, the goal of the Config Sprint, just as of the Design Sprint, is to reduce risk when bringing your ideas to life.
The Config Sprint belongs to the Support Diamond, which focuses on the implementation of the full 9 Diamond Framework as smoothly and rapidly as possible.
In our previous post, we discussed all the diamonds in detail. If you missed it or would like a quick recap — find the article here.
The ideas are out there
As with the whole 9 Diamond Framework, the Config Sprint is built upon existing and proven methodologies. In this case, we adopt the concept of innovation thesis, proposed by Tendayi Viki, Dan Toma and Esther Gons in their book ‘The Corporate Startup’ (2017). “In order to lead innovation successfully, every company needs a clear innovation thesis. Leaders need to take a point of view about where the world is going and how they plan to use innovation to respond.” (Viki)
The authors suggest that for thesis development, a company needs to take two main actions — analyze internal portfolio and research external business environment. The Config Sprint is the quickest and most efficient way to accomplish these actions.
For the Config Sprint we also make use of such concepts as Design Sprint by Google, and three horizons of innovation by McKinsey.
Make your first step a giant leap
The decision has been made — you are taking your innovation program to the next level. Great! The Config Sprint is the way to get the ball rolling. In just 5 days of structured sprint activities, you will:
- analyze the current innovation setup at your organization;
- define the desired state and find the gaps to fill in;
- formulate a data-driven innovation vision;
- come up with a very tangible action-plan;
- and test all your conclusions with subject-matter experts.
The Config Sprint consists of workshops, ideation sessions, and validation interviews. On a high-level, the daily schedule looks like this:
We believe that having 3 participants and 1 decision maker from a “Core” company in the sprint works best. This should be your Innovation managers, who have field experience in managing and executing innovation initiatives. C-levels and board members will be involved as experts and final decision makers. There should also be 3–4 external innovation experts and facilitators to lead the sprint, and challenge your ideas.
Before the sprint
There are 2 important things to do before you start a Config Sprint. First, book your own experts, who will further help with validating ideas. Then second, fill in the configuration questionnaire to answer different Mapping questions (an example configuration questionnaire can be found below).
All questions are connected to the parts of the 9 Diamond Framework. For example, we want to know about your HR structure for innovation, current ways to collect h2/h3 innovation ideas as well as assessment techniques for them, etc. The goal is to get an overview of the current organization and its innovation setup.
DAY 1. Prep day
We start with a close look at the current state of innovation management at the corporate and discuss the desired situation. For this purpose, we do a guided mapping exercise, going through all the answers to the Mapping questions. We discuss the findings and try to establish a shared understanding. Once we have covered all of the 9 diamonds, we ask participants to rate them from 1–10, based on how well these practices or processes are currently implemented in their organization.
This discussion and rating exercise is very insightful for both external and internal participants. What we often see is that corporates are doing quite a good job with h1 innovations, and based on this experience rate their ability high for h2/h3 innovation as well. That is where external innovation experts enter the stage with relevant and challenging questions, helping to provide honest feedback on where the gaps are.
We then delve deeper into low-rated areas to determine current innovation bottlenecks and validate our findings with various subject-matter experts from inside the corporate.
By the end of the day, we aim to determine an innovation vision, that we will focus on during the sprint. Though the choice for a vision is, without a doubt, an important one, the setup of the 9 Diamond Framework allows us to decide fast with little risk. How do we achieve this? There is a 3-month rhythm of visions in the 9 Diamond Framework, which means that every 3 months you will be testing a new vision. We believe innovation works best if you are exploring 3–5 future visions at a time. It allows you to reduce risk by spreading your bets across multiple visions: instead of putting all eggs in one basket. However, for the Config Sprint, we just need 1 focus vision to start with.
DAY 2. Mapping day
We usually have a break of several days between days 1 and 2. In the meantime, facilitators and external experts can interpret ratings and risks, share their opinions, and do the gap analysis, based on the day 1 input. Here is an example of how the analysis can look:
Based on the analysis we get 2 grades for each Mapping question, one from a company and another from external experts. These ratings can be easily converted into heatmaps. An example map can be found below.
During day 2 itself, we discuss these heatmaps. The goal is to have an implementation sequence — a timeline for the 9 Diamond Framework implementation. The first few diamonds to be implemented in an organization are often those where the gap is largest. However, we sometimes start with the diamond that is the most urgent or crucial to implement. In most cases that is the Radar.
We also take a deep-dive into the 9 Diamond Framework concept during this day. The ultimate idea behind the whole Config Sprint is to teach companies how to fish. The 9 Diamond Framework is not a secret tool or a sales trick, it’s a tangible setup tying together existing research and our own experience. Implementing the framework works best when all the stakeholders understand and can execute on it. Only then can you make sustainable innovation possible.
It’s important to go through details of the 3 main areas:
- Implementation of the framework;
- Operations;
- Initialization.
In order to make these areas actionable, we’ve created Diamond Implementation Canvases. The canvases are filled in for each diamond (or rather MVPs of diamonds that will be tested and iterated later).
At the end of day 2, we do another round of validation with C-level experts. The aim is to test the heatmap and implementation sequence.
DAY 3. Start-a-Fire
On day 3, the goal is to populate the heart of the framework, The Radar, with high-potential innovation sparks. These sparks can be in the form of challenges, ideas, startups, scale-ups, tech/IP, and talent. It is important that each spark fits the selected innovation vision. In our sprint setup, we do this work in advance by using our own software tool. It’s also possible to do business environment research and manual scouting instead.
Day 3 is comprised of a Harvest and Selection Sprint, which is basically a mini ideation session. Harvest and Selection are very important activities within the 9 Diamond Framework. During this day we go through different sparks, that we’ve already pre-filled in the Radar tool, and see if they are potentially able to create “fires,” resulting in new business models.
To achieve this, a facilitator ‘pitches’ each of the pre-filled sparks to sprint participants. Everyone in the room then individually rates each spark in the Radar tool. In the shared view on the big screen, we see the live group rating for each spark. This allows us to reduce the number of sparks and choose the ones that we will focus on.
DAY 4. Next Steps
During day 4, we go through a rapid succession of problem statement sessions and refine 3 to 5 challenges based on the chosen vision. We then plan Design Sprints to find prototype solutions and early validation for these challenges. The teams, dates, and subjects are planned during the session, so we don’t lose momentum.
This is also the day to update the final board pitch, in order to get a go for the initialization phase of the 9 Diamond program.
DAY 5 Pitch
PITCH! The final presentation with the whole innovation approach is pitched to the board. Even though it requires just 1–2 hours of involvement, it’s an incredibly important day. Thus, it is crucial that team members and decision-makers allocate enough time, The goal is to get an agreement and support to implement the next steps and start rolling out the program as soon as possible.
So what’s next?
The engines are on, all you need now is an implementation team and permission to get going. There are 2 things good to know about the next steps.
1. MVP First
Every diamond is implemented in an MVP setup first and then gradually built up towards a ‘fully’ operational state. In this MVP-stage, the implementation team might fill any role in the Framework while scouting for the best talent.
2. Shared Responsibilities
From Config Sprint to full 9 Diamond Framework implementation, the rollout is a shared project. For example, the Implementation team is built with staff from both oneUp and the corporate.
And that is it! You are ready to go! Need some support? Give us a call at +31 84 876 333 6 or send an email to Doortje Sneller at doortje@oneup.company. Need more info about oneUp? Check out our website.
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Love the article? Hate the article? Want to use any of our tools and canvases? Leave your comment below, and we will get back to you!
