Innovation and Product Development
Strategy tools for innovation and product development.
41 tools
- Affinity Diagrams — Group loose ideas or notes by natural theme, one card at a time, until the real categories emerge.
- BEANE Test for Product Adoption — Score a new product on five adoption drivers, Benefit, Ease, Availability, Need, Excitement, before you spend on launching it.
- Backcasting — Pick a specific future you want, then work backward to the choices that get you there, instead of projecting forward from today.
- Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) — A huge, clear, long-range goal that rallies an organisation without needing a business case.
- Co-opetition — Cooperate with a rival on what grows the market, compete hard for your share of it.
- Core Competence Analysis — Find the small number of capabilities that genuinely set you apart, not everything you happen to do well.
- Cross-Industry Innovation — Solve your problem by finding how an unrelated industry cracked the same underlying mechanism, then adapt it.
- Design Thinking — Solve problems by starting from real user behaviour: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test.
- Disruptive Technologies — Spot the cheap, simple offering incumbents ignore, then watch it improve until it takes the market.
- Drucker's Seven Sources of Innovation — Seven specific places to look for innovation opportunities, so the search isn't a random brainstorm.
- Economies of Agglomeration — Firms clustered in the same trade share suppliers, labour and know-how, cutting costs for all of them.
- Eight Simple Steps for New Product Development — A stage-gate route from idea to launch: screen it, test the concept, set the marketing strategy, trial it, launch it, then review what happened.
- Familiarity Matrix — Plot a new move by market and technology familiarity to see how far outside your base you're really stepping.
- Future Back Thinking — Start from a specific future you want and work backward to what must happen now.
- Generative AI in Business Strategy — Use generative AI to draft, stress-test and speed up strategic analysis, judgement stays human.
- Hook Model — Build a trigger-action-reward-investment loop into a product so use becomes a habit, not a marketing push.
- House of Quality — Line up customer needs against technical requirements in a matrix to see which choices actually matter.
- Idea Screening Matrix — Score every idea against the same weighted criteria so the shortlist survives on evidence, not volume.
- Innovation Circle — A four-stage loop, ideate, validate, incubate, scale, for taking ideas from raw notion to running in the business.
- Innovation Management Platforms — Software that gives idea intake, evaluation and tracking one home, instead of scattered emails and spreadsheets.
- Innovation Prioritisation — Rank competing ideas by impact against effort, so resources go to the few worth funding.
- Innovation Pyramid — Three tiers of innovation, incremental at the base, breakthrough at the top, to see if your pipeline is too safe or too thin.
- Innovation Radar — Twelve dimensions of innovation around four anchors, what, who, how, where, to show which levers you're actually pulling.
- Innovation vs. Reaction — The difference between shaping change before it hits and scrambling once it already has, and choosing which a situation calls for.
- Lean Startup Methodology — Test the riskiest assumption with a minimum viable product, measure real behaviour, and let the data decide the next move.
- Market Gap Analysis — Compare unmet customer needs against current offerings to find where demand outstrips supply.
- Minimum Viable Products (MVP) — Build the smallest testable version of an idea to learn what's true before committing real budget.
- New Product Development Model — Move an idea from new-product strategy to commercialisation through fixed stages, killing weak ideas early rather than late.
- New Service Development Model — Take a new service from objectives to launch through fifteen staged steps and a live pilot, since services can't be inspected before they sell.
- Open Market Innovation — Treat innovation like a two-way market - license in what you're missing, license out or sell what you're not using, instead of hoarding it all
- Product Opportunity Evaluation Matrix - Poem Matrix — Score each product idea A to F against five forces - customer, product, timing, competition, finance - and compare them side by side instead of
- Rapid Prototyping Tools — Build a rough, testable version of an idea fast to get real feedback before committing money to it.
- SOAR Analysis — A positive-focused alternative to SWOT: Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, Results.
- Simplex Process — An eight-stage loop from finding the real problem to action, built to run again once implementation surfaces the next one.
- Skimming Pricing — Launch high, lower the price in stages as you move from early adopters to the mass market.
- Strategic Horizons — Split growth investment across today's core, tomorrow's emerging bets, and options for what's not yet visible.
- Strategic Innovation Canvas — Map market, customer needs, competitors and capability on one page to spot where the gaps are.
- Superhero Strategy — A workshop exercise: describe your strategy through a superhero's power, weakness and villain to surface what people won't say directly.
- Technology Life Cycle — Track a technology through introduction, growth, maturity and decline to time investment and replacement.
- Three Horizons of Growth — Manage growth across three time horizons at once: today's core, emerging bets, and future options.
- Wardley Maps — Map your value chain by visibility to the customer and by evolution, novel to commodity, to decide where to build vs buy.