An Align Phase: Easy Steps to Avoid Millions of Wasted Innovation Dollars

We’ve seen and been a part of millions and millions of dollars of wasted innovation spend, seeing:

• Teams focus on exciting ventures that don’t fit the innovation DNA or appetite of the company and eventually get rejected
• Products not getting to market because they’ve never garnered the internal support they need
• Venture efforts fizzling out because the internal team is left without the training, support, or preparation to be successful. Internal teams are stalling due to lack of skills or confidence in the next steps to take. 

So much of this wasted spend can be prevented by focusing on a simple set of Alignment activities with your team prior to jumping into early discovery work. 

Oftentimes, we get so excited to employ customer-centric research and venture methods that we turn our backs on the organiation until its time to ask for money or permission. 

What happens? 

We haven’t taken the time to understand our leadership, how this innovation work fits within their goals, or what innovation types actually will be successful in the company. We missed the chance of employing the same customer empathy and feedback tools with our own internal customers.

We confuse our leadership.

Our work has no clear connection to their goals.

It fizzles out. 

To get ahead of this, we employ an “Align” phase of work before we hop into “Discovery” phases. What does an “Align” Phase achieve?

• Aligns a team on the company's definition and interpretation of "innovation"
• Helps define what types of innovation the company can best succeed at
• Helps define what types of innovation the company will accept and fund
• Helps innovation team understand the jobs to be done of their leadership and peers
• Captures and structures leadership hunches about innovation opportunities to inform future discovery work

Take a look at what an Align phase of work can achieve:

And here's how we facilitated an Align process for a recent client:

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You can read about our entire Approach here. If you'd like to connect and discuss a piece of work on your plate, grab some time here.