Lean innovation framework
Build innovation into your organisation
How we work
Whether we are creating a new content marketing strategy, designing a high-value lead gen tool, or building a bespoke website. We view all projects through three lenses:
- Understanding the audience
- Creating innovative solutions
- Collaborative delivery
Twenty years in the making, this is our "Lean innovation" framework. Born from our obsession with audiences. Forged in our publishing roots.
The framework incorporates the best academic thinking from MIT and the Harvard Business School, combined with the agility of Silicon Valley's "Lean Startup" movement.
The result is a proven process that generates stakeholder buy-in across the business by breaking down internal silos and creating a shared understanding of both challenges and opportunities.
In a world where it is now possible to build anything, our relentless focus on the audience ensures we build the right things.
It's simple but not simplistic. Along the way, we transfer our knowledge to your team to ensure they become independent, not dependent.
Understand
Audiences, jobs and journeys:
It is tempting to skip this stage and move straight on to the more exciting process of innovation and delivery.
But innovation without understanding is guessing at best and gambling at worst.
We help you build a deep understanding of the audience, the jobs they need to get done, and the journeys that they are on, increasing the likelihood of your project's success by 400%.
Even better, carefully defined jobs don't change too much over time, so the effort you put in now will continue to pay you back over the next 3-5 years.
Innovate
Explore and exploit:
In an AI-augmented world, innovation will become a critical differentiator.
MIT estimates that around 50% of innovation comes from internal teams. Yet most organisations don't have a systematic approach to capturing those ideas.
Ideas are not the problem, they are everywhere. The challenge is to systematically collate and validate them against real audience needs.
The good news is that Generative AI is a catalyst that will greatly accelerate users' ability to innovate.
With audience mapping as an anchor, we will help you create and test new customer value propositions that both exploit your current solutions and explore new business models.
Deliver
Build, measure, learn:
The “Understand” and “Innovate” stages ensure we build the right solution. But that means nothing if we don't build the solution right.
Our process is lean and iterative rather than rigid. Work with your team on a series of sprints that allow continuous refinement, to deliver bespoke websites and lead generation tools.
We identify key metrics as part of the journey mapping process, automatically baking measurement into every project, ensuring we can learn and optimise performance over time.
Delivering value
A tried and tested framework
Over the last 18 months we have helped:
Global management consultancy
Re-architect their website from being sector and service based to focus instead on five core client challenges. These value propositions now underpin the business's global content strategy.
Top 50 UK legal services firm
Rationalise a collection of 44 discrete service lines into three core customer value propositions. Helping the marketing team overhaul the group's positioning and business planning process.
£2bn global engineering firm
Join up their international approach across 150 countries, ensuring that their digital strategy was based firmly on audience needs rather than internal business structures.
UK Financial services provider
Switch from a product focus to restructure their content and navigation around five key audience journeys, re-architecting the website structure and refocusing their content marketing strategy.
The INNOVATION PORTFOLIO
A framework to manage continuous innovation
The work isn't over when the project is complete. To achieve long-term success, you need to exploit what you have today while simultaneously exploring what will bring you success tomorrow.
Our innovation portfolio helps you manage these initiatives in a visual, easy-to-understand framework that unites teams across different departments with a shared view of how they contribute to the overall success.
Find out more
Build innovation into your organisation
If you want to go beyond traditional project management to bake audience focussed innovation into your organisation, book an initial 30 minute chat using the calendar opposite.