The Innovation Thesis Canvas

What's an Innovation Thesis - An Innovation Thesis helps a company decide where to innovate and how by combining a view of external opportunities with internal strategy, objectives, and capabilities.- Once formed, an Innovation Thesis provides a guide for executives when evaluating potential initiatives, supporting the selection of ideas that represent the most value in the context of the organization's vision and objectives.- For innovation and innovators across the organization, it provides a clear direction and mandate.

Why do you need one - No innovation thesis = innovation can become random without a North Star. Organizations waste time on the wrong projects and don’t know when to allocate capital and when to kill projects. ‘Interesting’ opportunities win over what is best for the organization.- An innovation thesis gives the organization a clear direction and paves the way for coordinated innovation that's synergistic.- It's clear to everyone what type of innovation is to be supported and what should be stopped, allowing innovation activity to be targeted and resource-efficient.

What is this template- This is a workshop template designed to guide cross-functional leaders to develop a draft innovation thesis together (we encourage further subsequent iteration and validation)- Our hope is that it fosters collaboration, enables critical thinking and leads to a compelling thesis with clear supporting rationale-

Note: This is a workshop template and the results will only be as good as the work that goes into it and that comes out of it.

How best to use it- We recommend selecting a clear focus to begin with, such as a business unit or a high-level theme where we are confident we want to innovate (such as Net Zero or Circularity)- Assemble your team and divide up / assign the inputs across the group (see ' Getting set-up')- Find and block minimum 3 hours to work on this together... we recommend this over a-synchronous working, as the resulting discussion yields higher quality insights and ideas.- It can be done all in one session, ideally during the morning (make sure you build in some time for breaks if doing in one sitting)., but it can also be split down into 2 or several shorter workshops, tackling individual agenda items.