Sprints & Validation
The most important and most challenging part of the innovation journey is the phase we call "Sprints & Validation". Why? Because this phase represents often the opposite of a work culture we often find in traditional organisations coming from the world of perfectionism, risk-prevention and exploitation of the existing.
Purpose
The purpose of the phase is to reduce uncertainties as good as possible with a seemingly contradictory combination of entrepreneurial pragmatism and scientific precision. We never believe our gut feeling or "experience" when it comes to the evaluation of new ideas. We need facts! And for this, we turn ideas into holistic business models, identify success-critical hypotheses and start testing them with highly effective but lightweight experiments. These experiments usually require models and prototypes as a reduced representation of our business model. They are never perfect but optimised for a certain purpose.
Elements
1
Setup
High-performance team consisting of 3-5 experts with a diverse background and productive social "interplay", combined with a committed sponsorship from top management.
2
Agile learning process
Systematic implementation and learning process with short iterations (of 10 weeks each) that guides teams through the troubled waters of design and validation.
3
Guiding tools & templates
A range of well-thought-out tools and templates supports team members on every phase of the process to ask the right questions at the "right altitude".
4
Hypotheses & experiments
Experiments as means to generate facts required for decision-making, usually based on hypotheses that are most uncertain and success-critical.
5
Decision-making
Decisions made by sponsors at the end of each iteration: Kill the idea ("red"), improve ("yellow") or execute ("green") it.