The strategic innovation routine: From problem to business model

Why does innovation need a routine?

Because otherwise it depends on chance and on individual people. Neither is a basis for a strategy meant to carry you for five years.

That's why spotting new market opportunities belongs inside the strategy process, not next to it. Thinking about the day after tomorrow runs parallel to the work on tomorrow, at its own rhythm.

The difference between routine and chance is repeatability. A good idea in the summer is a stroke of luck. A method that produces three tested approaches four times a year is a capability.

The effort involved is smaller than expected. One round with six to eight people over two days, four times a year, takes eight days per participant annually. That's less than an average internal project, and it delivers more reliably.

What matters here is defining the process explicitly and communicating it: how does an idea turn into real new business? Without that decision, the new routine becomes activity that serves no one.

How do you capture the problem?

With a focus market and a written inventory. As a team, write down how you understand the market conditions and customer value today.

Then look for problems and opportunities on both sides, supply and demand. The guiding questions are simple: who are today's customers? Who could tomorrow's be?

Start with the non-customers. Whoever isn't buying from you today gives you the more interesting clues, because their needs aren't met by your current offering. That's where new opportunities show up more often than among satisfied existing customers.

For both groups, it's worth building a model of a typical customer that captures the attributes that drive the buying decision. Such models are only as good as the data behind them, which is why they need to be checked against real observations.

Actually write this inventory down. Forcing it into writing regularly reveals that two people in the room understand the market differently, and that conversation is worth having before any search for ideas.

The closing question is this: which elements of your offering create the main value for these customers? Price, quality, availability, advice, speed. That answer is the starting point for everything that follows.

How do you find and combine models?

By looking outside your own industry. This is the step that gets cut short most often, because it feels like a detour.

Look for companies that have solved a similar problem, ideally in a completely different field. A trade business learns more about scheduling from a medical practice than from another trade business.

The third step is the actual innovation work: combining the models you've found into new solutions. Rarely does one model fit directly. Almost always, combining two approaches produces something that fits your situation.

Stay open to prompts and new ideas that come up along the way. At the end, you select the three most promising solutions together, and those move on to the next phase.

What belongs in a business model draft?

Nine fields that fit together on a single page. The framework is widely used, and its value lies in the fact that gaps show up immediately.

It also pays to take a second look at the value proposition on its own: What jobs do your customers have, what pains come with them, and what gains are they looking for? Against those three points you set your products, your pain relievers, and your gain creators.

Finally, compare costs and revenues. A draft that skips this comparison is a product idea, not yet a business model.

How do you test?

As early and as cheaply as possible. The fifth step is testing and learning, and the order of those two words is not a detail.

A test needs an assumption that can be proven wrong. “Customers would pay for this” is such an assumption. “The product is good” is not, because no result can be derived from it.

For mid-sized companies, the cheapest test is usually a conversation with a real customer and a concrete offer. If you get a commitment before anything is built, you have tested the most important assumption.

Decide in advance what you will do if the result is negative. Making that call up front is the difference between a test and a search for confirmation.

How do you anchor the routine?

With a kickoff and a rhythm. A two-day workshop with a mixed team from across the organization introduces the routine and its methods.

The mix matters more than the experience. People from production, service, and sales see problems that never surface in the leadership circle, and they know the limits of what is actually feasible.

After that, you need a cadence. One round per quarter is realistic for most mid-sized companies, and more rarely delivers more, because testing has to happen between the rounds.

Record what you discarded and why. After two years, that list is more valuable than the list of ideas you pursued, because market conditions change and an idea discarded back then can be viable under new ones.

And you need a decision-making authority. Who decides which idea moves forward, on what criteria, and with what budget? Without that answer, good approaches stay stuck in the idea collection, and by the third round nobody shows up to the workshop.

And make sure the results become visible. If nobody in the company hears what became of the ideas, fewer people will join next time, and the routine falls asleep before it ever became one.

One more note on who takes part: invite one or two people from outside for each round, from a partner company or a university, for example. They ask the questions nobody inside asks anymore, because everyone believes they already know the answer.

The most important sentence comes last. It is from the book and it applies to the entire step: reinventing yourself again and again and never standing still has become the demand of our time. A routine is the only form in which a company can meet that demand alongside day-to-day business.