The new extended innovation funnel

The ideas funnel has been with us a long time. We put our ideas into the funnel and then through a process of elimination out ‘pop’s’ finished products.

Henry Chesbrough’s famous depiction of the Open Funnel has continued that concept, that ideas enter the more ‘open’ innovation process and go through a more ‘staged gate’ or equivalent process to emerge as the finished product or even spun-out- all well and good.

In the past few weeks the funnel has been constantly coming back in my life. It has been bugging me. Recently I was at a European Innovation Conference and we got into a roundtable discussion on managing ideas and up pop’s the fuzzy front end and the funnel and putting ideas through this.

To be provocative I said “well ideas are actually in the middle of the innovation process” and we got into a significant debate on this and concluded that we all did not share a common language on this or understanding of what I was struggling to articulate.

So let me lay out my view. Firstly this was not as inspired as an insight I can fully lay claim to as mine. I had read somewhere this very point, that ideas lie more in the middle of the innovation process but just could not remember where I had read it- grey cells are my excuse.

Placing Design into the Innovation Equation

Let me be clear, this is not my blog entry I really wish it was. It is the relevant part of a blog written by Sarah Stein Greenberg (http://ideas.economist.com/blog/design-mind) that just seemed to hit one of those ‘buttons’ that sum something up so well, and in this case, I think the best compliment is to just share it. I’ve put in what I feel are appropriate headings for ease of reading only.

It is about the power of design and interaction to make something new happen fast.

Tackling messy problems

“A pressing question for more established economies… is how to foster more entrepreneurship and innovation despite greater stability and predictability.

One method that companies and individuals are adopting is design thinking—the approach of scaling or “group-sizing” the way that solo designers have always worked to enable to cross-functional teams tackle messy problems that don’t fit neatly into any one person’s job description or academic discipline.

Design thinking is one way to simulate some of the extremely dynamic conditions of an emerging economy and foster entrepreneurship in the US.

Forcing direct contact with users

Business model innovation can really help Venture Capital assessment

I believe the Business model canvas, presented by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur in their book “Business Model Generation”, holds a very powerful way for Venture Capital to use in their assessments of promising ventures they are considering for investment.

Traditional pitches to VC’s are loaded with financial numbers, providing crisp, well written business plans pitched by teams oozing with optimism but much of this is still highly intangible in reality. There is often a decision made on the people’s chemistry more than anything else.

There is nothing wrong with that if you are the lucky ones, but tough on the countless thousands that face rejection after rejection for their ideas to attract the necessary funding needed to move their business forward.

Where the Business model canvas can fit in the VC pitch.