FuTUREPROOFING : NEXT'S FUTURE INNOVATION SPRINTS
A focused, intensive 12-24 week process aimed to get ahead of today’s most pressing market forces & future shifts, tap into the highest-impact customer, talent & technology opportunities, and achieve innovation at scale 5X faster than traditional methods.
Work Through the Key Four Steps of Delivering Your New Innovation Portfolio in 12-24 Weeks
Futureproofing : Next has minted its hallmark innovation sprint solution for companies to “see, learn, decide & commit” to their next round of innovation projects & ventures, considerably faster and smarter than traditional approaches. We bring an intensive battery of discovery, processes, tools, resources, canvases and roadmaps, all under one umbrella to get you onto your next plane of growth. Before now, there wasn’t a proven method for innovation that began with the future as a point of departure, but now partner with us to bring your future forward and make a serious dent in your innovation horizon.
The First 6-12 Weeks – Prepare, See & Learn
We set up a laboratory to help companies imagine themselves in entirely new markets.
How might a bank play in the fintech arena? Which platform plays make sense for a B2B service provider?
What partners from the ecosystem might accelerate progress? What might a new business model be to bring the initiative to a large scale?
Participants experience in-depth briefings on future opportunities.
“If you don’t know what future you’re trying to create and don’t see beyond your own industry for signs of change, you’ll miss the boat. Futureproofing : Next has built up an integrated sprint solution so that we not only don’t miss the future, but we can act on it too.”
The Next 6-12 Weeks – Decide, Commit & Commercialize
Teams tackle the science of modeling a new product, service or novel business model (or, all three) to refine initial concepts.
They are held to a weekly report back expectations, and via ongoing workshops throughout the engagement, harness relevant data, conduct experiments with potential customers, apply novel technologies, and integrate cross-industry models until their initial experiments are validated and readied for commercialization.
LEAN-BASED APPROACH, fortune 500 TESTED, TANGIBLE OUTCOMES
Eight-six percent of company executives recognize the need to change their innovation capacity and only seven percent of companies believe they can test new ideas and deploy them quickly. Supercharge and accelerate your innovation curves by investing in a Future Innovation Sprint that gets you from innovation “Go” to “Boardwalk” in as little as 12 weeks.
FORGET THE FLUFF, WE HAVE BOILED IT DOWN TO THE SIMPLE & REAL
Sometimes the best things in life are simple. Futureproofing ; Next has distilled the innovation process to its barest essence: “see, learn, decide, commit’.
Our innovation sprints will take teams through each of these key components sequentially to ensure we translate the right ideas to market.
Our bespoke program is supported by 50+ tools and templates to guide and enhance the effort and outcomes. This is just not our opinion. We have also supported our approach with real market-won insights from our 16+ marketplace studies including our study of innovation in the wild The Corporate Innovation Playbook.
FUTUREPROOFING : NEXT SPRINTS
where others go wrong
STARTING WITH IDEAS
Ideas are the first seeds of innovation. Implementing a forum for identifying innovative ideas across and outside a company is a great capacity-building practice. However, without a process to identify, validate and commercialize the winning ideas, this effort will not produce results and the post-ideastorm enthusiasm will wane, leading to even greater disappointment in the long run.
STARTING WITH TODAY's CUSTOMER PROBLEMS
Remembering Henry’s Ford’s line, “if we asked the customer, they would have asked for a faster horse.” Most customers are limited on being able to see a much different reality than the one they exist in now. Finding heaviliy involved customers & prosumers and a wider range of experts and stakeholders builds a much better 360* view of potential futures. Customers as a stimulus & jumping off point, a jury & validation point and for context-specific engagement insights and experience journey – we say yes. Outsourcing and delegating the art & science of innovation genius and corporate innovation incubation to customers – please no, no, no.
STARTING INSIDE THE FOUR WALLS EXCLUSIVELY
it’s important to look at the world as a bigger place than just the bubble that we live in. It’s so easy to get caught up in things of a trivial nature.. More than half of executives believe the next big disruption and innovation leap will come from outside their current industry, so shouldn’t we look there too? We need a disciplined process to look cross-industry and learn what we need to about important NEW fields that might be adjacent to our own or altogether outside our current realm of mastery.
LEAN STARTUP BEAUTY PAGEANTS
The popularity of the lean startup method is well deserved., However, iI shouldn’t be about who is the best pitcher of a new idea or business canvas.. American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent are great TV shows, but not great ways to incubate innovation. The goal should be to reward truly innovative and validated innovation ideas, not a team’s public speaking skills.. Innovation ideation should also be about strategic intent, mutual engagement, shared discovery and actual production not selling, scripting and noise.
Corporate Hackathons Panacea
Hackathons are great short-term ventures but suffer from a decided lack of “why”. Before you get the unbridled spirit of motivated coders and experimenters involved, in your enterprise, do the tough work of asking five key questions : “why do we want to hack?”, “what do we want (and not want) out of it?”, “where does the customer get involved (vs. producing something cool)?”, “who will inherit the hacked solution?” and “how will we sell it to others?”.
Open Innovation Abdication
Open forums of innovation, collaboration, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing are important levers to get outside-in innovation triggers, but they are designed to be misdirected without a strategic purpose as a framework or without a north star as a criteria and guide. If you don’t know where you’re going, we don’t care how many people get involved, you don’t want them getting there very fast. Most of the results of these efforts also have a tough time being sustained and incubated inside large companies, without ownership & venture development.
SWOT Analysis
Garbage in, garbage out. The same thinking that got you into the current innovation bind you are in, will likely be the same thinking that will send you off errantly as a point of new innovation departure. SWOT analysis is a widely-used, industrial age-era management tool that looks at current perceptions of company strengths, weakenesses, opportunities & threats that unfortunately carries bias in its anecdoatal, non data-based nature, lacks an urgency & prioritization component, underestimates future context and does not lead to an obvious action p;lan.
Design Thinking - "Head in the CLOUDS" Big Problem Digging
In the absence of time, money and competitive constraints, well funded design thinking efforts may be laudatory. However in the crushing reality of the marketplace, these efforts take way too long, are too expensive and have suspect results as they aim for the big home run, vs. hitting a lot of smart singles, doubles and triples. Plus, they have a spotty record when they come to commercializing and launching the fruits of their efforts.
Jumping Right into Agile Innovation Development and Scrums
In established technology & digitalizing firms, “agile” plays a key role in iterating product design and development. However, in most companies, implementing agile at scale is challenging without a lot of advance organizational spadework and training. It also frequently aims for small incremental improvements by satellite teams vs. big ambitious growth ventures, radical new structures & networks and new business models that need to align & cascade organization-wide.
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