TOOLS: Innovation

Tools Tuesday: There are frameworks for everything. Even to do disruption in an orderly fashion.

I still remember business school. It was the good old days when my employer was paying more than half the tuition, and I was mixing with energetic, over-confident young professionals, under the marquee of the late Wayne Huizenga.

When you get through an MBA, they cram in your head as many different frameworks that may be out there, but -let’s be honest- business school does not really teach you how to innovate. They can't. Most business schools are entrenched in their classic model themselves.

But one of the best innovation frameworks I have encountered, is the one put together by Brian Quinn, Helen Walters, Larry Keeley, and Ryan Pikkel in their publication “Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs”.

They look at three major domains, Configuration, Offering, and Experience, and then further break them down into specifics.

They provide a map to answer the question “where should we innovate?”, but a framework will never be able to answer the “what” nor the “how” question on this.