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Innovation Patterns

Find, shape and test new ideas on purpose.

Methods for any team that wants to find, shape and test new ideas, and keep doing so. The cards start with spotting opportunities and framing better questions, move through generating, combining and shaping ideas into concepts, then cover value and business models, testing a concept before you build it, and making innovation a habit rather than a lucky break.

56 cards · 8 suits · 7 recipes · 4 missions

What's inside

• Spot7Have you found a real opportunity yet?
• Frame7Is the question you are asking the right one?
• Ideas7Have you gone wide before going deep?
• Remix7Can you borrow or combine to go further?
• Shape7Can you describe the idea as a concept?
• Value7Is it worth paying for and worth doing?
• Test7Have you checked the riskiest assumption cheaply?
• Habit7Does innovation happen here without a lucky break?

A few cards

Spot

Jobs to be Done

People don't buy products; they hire them to make progress in a particular situation.

Ideas

Quantity First

Aim for a hundred ideas and hold judgement; the good ones come after the obvious ones.

Shape

COCD Box

Sort ideas by how original and how doable they are, so the bold ones that can actually be done stand out.

One card in full

Test

Desirability, Feasibility, Viability

Score the concept on whether people want it, whether you can make it and whether it can pay its way, then test the weakest first.

Concepts usually fail on one of three counts: nobody wanted it, it couldn't be built, or it couldn't pay its way. Teams tend to test the count they are most comfortable with, so engineers prototype and marketers survey. Scoring all three side by side shows where the real risk sits.

How to use it

1. Write three questions. Desirability: do the people we serve want this? Feasibility: can we build and deliver it? Viability: should we, given the money and our goals?
2. Under each, list the two or three biggest unknowns.
3. Score each lens from 1 to 5 for how much evidence you have, not how confident you feel.
4. Pick the lowest score and design the next test for it on a Test Card.
5. Re-score after every test. Move on when no lens is a clear weak spot.

Example

A hospital team's idea for remote follow-up calls scores high on feasibility, middling on desirability and low on viability: nobody knows who would fund the staff time. They talk to finance before anyone builds anything.

Watch out

• Averaging the scores. A concept with two fives and a one is still a one.

Write the unknowns as Leap of Faith Assumptions; answer feasibility questions with a Feasibility Spike.

Recipes

• Find An Opportunity: Walk the real task yourself, watch how people patch it, name the job behind the patch, dig to the cause and end with one question worth answering.
• Go Wide On Ideas: Set one question, push the group past the obvious answers, let quiet people build on each other, twist what exists and sort the pile by boldness and feasibility.
• Insight To Idea: Turn a pile of research into one fresh idea written up as a launch-day press release, with its failure modes and harms checked before you share it.
• Is It A Business?: Check the concept meets a real need, write its one-page model, try proven ways to make money from it, size the market and see whether one customer pays back.
• Test Before You Build: Name the beliefs the concept dies without, imagine its failure, plan a test with a pass line, deliver it by hand, weigh the evidence and decide.
• Unstick A Stale Idea: Break the rules your category takes for granted, borrow from a field with the same problem, force a chance connection, combine the best parts and put the result on one page.
• Will It Fly?: Before someone commits budget, check that people understand the concept, want it enough to switch, that you can build it and that it can pay its way.

Missions

• Find out why players churn: from a retention drop to evidence-backed reasons, combining churn data, lapsed-player conversations and a ranked list of fixes to test.
• Build an innovation portfolio: from scattered side projects to a balanced pipeline across three horizons, with milestone-based funding and a regular pivot-or-persevere checkpoint.
• Run an idea sprint: from a fuzzy challenge to three shaped concepts, each on a concept poster with its leap-of-faith assumption and a test card.
• Test a product idea: from a product idea the team already likes to the one way it is most likely to fail, turned into a small test with a pass line, a deadline and the decision each result triggers.

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