New Business Blueprint

This document captures all the results from previous phases of the end-to-end innovation process, evolves them even further and outlines the way to market for a new business. Everybody involved in this process should be familiar with every single chapter. Let's go!

Bernhard Doll

Business Design Maverick

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Content

1. Overview

2. Key Elements

3. Download

4. Usage Scenarios

5. Instructions for Coaches

6. Q & A

1. Overview

The new business blueprint is the central results document of the entire End-to-End Innovation Process. It brings together everything you've worked out so far in compact form and prepares the next steps. Its content usually decides whether and how the new business goes to market, and how you hand it over to operational business units such as engineering and sales. It is not the Proposal for Decision-making in a new format: that document closes an iteration of Phase IV and asks the Project Sponsor whether the work continues, while this one opens Phase V and asks who takes the business to market.

Because this document sits at the interface between innovation management and the process steps that follow, its shape depends on your company and industry. Treat the structure presented here as inspiration, not as a template to copy directly.

Keep in mind

What matters is that downstream process steps take the results from the end-to-end innovation process into account, instead of ignoring them out of a "not-invented-here" mindset.

2. Key Elements

Element	Question	Pages	Comments
Executive Summary	What is this business, in one sentence someone outside the project would understand? Why is now the right time, and why is the organisation / this team the right one to build it? What decision or approval are we asking the management to make after reading this?	1	Shouldn't be longer than one page!
Picture of the Future	Which element(s) of the Picture of the Future are addressed with this new business? How does this business move us toward the Picture of the Future?	2	Be visual. You could even paste visual parts of the Picture of the Future into the document. Make sure that all relevant elements are big enough and easy to recognise.
Market & Customer Context	How big is the addressable market (TAM/SAM/SOM), and how confident are we in that number? Who is the focus target segment, and what distinguishes them behaviourally from others? What evidence (interviews, data) supports that this segment is worth building for?	1	It is specifically important to outline if we are guessing here or if there is evidence. TAM = Total Addressable Market SAM = Serviceable Addressable Market SOM = Serviceable Obtainable Market
Playground(s) Explored	Which playgrounds are involved in the new business? What have we learned so far in our explorative projects?	1	The results from research projects should be outlined very briefly. Focus on the main insights which have led to the new business.
Value Proposition & Positioning	What job(s) to get done are we solving, and how do customers solve it today? How is our offer meaningfully different from existing alternatives? Where do we sit in the competitive landscape — red ocean or genuine whitespace?	1
Business Model	How do we create, deliver, and capture value? What are the one or two elements of this model that are truly novel versus industry standard? What has to work simultaneously for this business model to hold together?	3
Customer Journey	How does the focus segment first discover and try this offer? What are the moments that matter most across onboarding, usage, and retention?	1
Financial Case	What revenue and cost logic drives the numbers, and where do they trace back to the market sizing above? What investment is required, and over what time frame do we expect break-even? What are the one or two assumptions the whole financial case is most sensitive to?	1	Predict revenue based on the predicted market size over at least three years. Subtract operational expenses and derive investment needs from the accumulated negative free cash flow, plus upfront investment for infrastructure and other assets. Mark which numbers seem accurate and which are wild guesses and highly volatile for higher transparency.
Hypotheses & Validation Results	What are the hypotheses — that, if wrong, break the model? What results do we have from sprint projects (Phase IV)?	2
Organisation & Capabilities	What team, roles, and skills does this business need to run? What already exists inside the organisation, and what must be built, hired, or bought? Which partners are essential rather than nice-to-have?	2
Go-to-Market	What's the realistic path from first customer to scale?	1
Roadmap & Milestones	What are the outcome-based milestones (not just activities) between now and launch/scale? Who owns each milestone, and what has to be true to call it done? Where are the decision gates where we'd stop, pivot, or accelerate?	2
Risks & Open Questions	What risks sit outside the validation activities — dependencies, external/regulatory factors? For each risk, how likely and how severe is it, and what mitigates it? What questions remain genuinely unresolved that this blueprint doesn't answer?	1
Appendix	What underlying data (interviews, calculations, sources) backs the claims made above? Where can a reader go to verify a specific number or quote? What was considered but left out of the main narrative for brevity?	1

3. Download

pptx New Business Blueprint 15.60 MB

Download

4. Usage Scenarios

Aligning all people involved in the go-to-market process for a new business
Supporting decision-making on which new business is ready to be engineered and launched

5. Instructions for Coaches

Watch out for copy-paste from Phase IV. The material is the same, the audience and the question are not. Make your team rewrite, not reformat — and if they resist, let one of them read the old document out loud as if they were the head of engineering.
Hold the page budget. A chapter that keeps growing is usually a chapter where the team has not decided something yet. Ask what the open decision is instead of asking for a shorter text.
Insist that every guess is labelled as a guess (use red / orange / green colour-coding), especially in the Financial Case. Teams find this uncomfortable in front of management. Remind them that an unmarked guess that later turns out wrong costs far more credibility than an honest one ever did.

6. Q & A

We wrote a Proposal for Decision-making at the end of our last sprint. Is this the same document under a different name? No — and copying one into the other is the fastest way to lose your reader. The proposal for decision-making closes one iteration of Phase IV: it tells the Project Sponsor what the team learned and asks whether the work continues. The new business blueprint opens Phase V: it tells the organisation how this business goes to market and asks who builds it. The chapter lists look alike because both draw on the same results. The questions behind them do not. Use your proposal as raw material and rewrite it for the new audience.
Who writes the blueprint — the project team or the business unit that will run the business? The project team writes it, because the results belong to them. But bring in the people who will take the business over while the document is still unfinished — engineering, sales and operations. A blueprint that lands complete on someone's desk invites exactly the "not-invented-here" reflex this document exists to prevent. Ask them what they need to see in it, and give them a chapter to argue with.
We haven't validated everything yet. Should we wait until we have? No. Waiting for full validation means waiting forever, and Phase V is where remaining uncertainty gets managed, not eliminated. Write down what you tested, what came back and what you never got to. Hypotheses & Experiments shows you how to tell an open question from a hypothesis. An honest gap is something the sponsor can decide on. A hidden gap turns into a surprise six months into the build.
Most of the numbers in our Financial Case are guesses. Do we still put them in? Yes — and mark every one of them. Separate the numbers you can trace back to evidence from the ones you estimated, and name the one or two assumptions the whole case hangs on. The Financial Sanity Check gives you the logic for it. A guess labelled as a guess is useful. A guess dressed up as a forecast costs you the reader's trust in every other chapter too.