Services

I nnovation is something every business struggles with at some point. That’s where EDIT comes in. At the heart of EDIT lives a simple goal: help people to become better innovators, through coaching, facilitation, and training. Based on our work with some of the world’s best innovators over the course of nearly three decades, our approach to innovation releases the creativity inside companies, then works to turn that creativity into creation in the simplest, most reliable way. Our services are all aligned to that intent, and focus on three main areas: 1. innovation strategy, 2. launch tactics, and 3. creative technique.

Innovation Strategy
Launch Tactics
Creative Technique

Becoming a consistent innovator requires an effective strategy, one that is that answers the question that keeps most leaders up at night: how do we stand out and stay relevant in a massively distracting and mostly disruptive world?

A good strategy answers that question clarity on two key choices: where to play, and how to win. Too often, people don’t know what winning looks like. Without a vivid picture of a dramatic destination and a workable travel plan, why it’s urgent and important for everyone to be on board, and what things will look like when they get there, creative engagement in the innovation initiative will surely wane.

innovate, or evaporate

The magic of strategy lies in the rich discussion and creative energy involved in framing those choices in just the right way. Blending established tools and a reliable facilitation method honed over years of working with some of the world's most innovative business minds, EDIT offers three unique engagements to help leaders at all levels craft a winning innovation strategy:

Play-To-Win Summit

S trategy means different things to different people. Some define strategy as a vision, some as a plan. Others define it as optimizing the status quo, or perhaps following best practices. Still others deny that strategy is possible, especially in times of great and rapid change.

At EDIT, we subscribe to the approach devised and taught to us by our esteemed colleague and friend Roger Martin, dean of U. Toronto's progressive Rotman School and former head of Monitor: strategy is really about an integrated cascade of choices that uniquely positions a player in its industry to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.

Making and acting on choices produces winners. Why? Because clear, tough choices force your hand, confine you to a path, but free you to focus on what matters most: winning. Great firms don't choose to simply play. They choose to win.

At the center of the cascade lie two key choices: where to play, and how to win.

These two tightly bound choices form the very core of strategy and are the two most critical questions in strategy formulation. They're invaluable when it comes to innovation strategy.

Which is why they form the heart of the EDIT Play-To-Win Summit.

The Summit moves from gaining clarity on the winning aspiration--the value you wish to create, and the problem you want to solve--to choosing a playing field that allows you to achieve that aim and brings the required focus, to defining the choices for winning on that field. To determine how to win, you must decide what will enable you to create and sustainably deliver unique value to customers in a way that is distinct from competitors.

Once the critical choices have been clarified, each choice is reverse engineered to determine what must be true in order that a given choice is executable.

The outcome is a powerful portfolio of testable hypotheses which, when explored, yield the final winning strategy for high-performance innovation.

Download 1-page Brochure

Total Innovation Matrix

W all Street knows it. Venture firms know it. The C-suite knows it: the long-range viability of your company depends on your ability to continually innovate and stay relevant.

The pressure to innovate in a fiercely competitive market demands a strong and balanced portfolio of innovation initiatives. All too often those initiatives are haphazard, dispersed, and episodic. The investment in innovation isn't managed as effectively as other investments: with a clear portfolio strategy optimized for the highest overall return.

Enter the EDIT Total Innovation Matrix --T.I.M.

The T.I.M. operationalizes the Play-To-Win framework (see Play-To-Win Summit tab above) and helps teams develop a holistic view of how to get ahead by organizing initiatives, resources and goals based on three innovation levels:

existing
emerging
entrepreneurial

The lower lefthand corner of the matrix identifies core innovation initiatives focused on enhancing, optimizing and exploiting changes to existing products and making incremental inroads into new markets.

The upper righthand corner of the matrix identifies entrepreneurial initiatives designed to experiment with altogether new, radical and potentially disruptive innovations.

In the middle of the matrix lie emerging innovations, which leverage a core strength in a new space, share the traits of existing and entrepreneurial innovations, and represent the next generation of high-growth opportunities in the innovation pipeline.

The outcome of the EDIT Total Innovation Matrix session is a compelling visual roadmap of current, emerging and future developments comprising a cohesive innovation portfolio, showing how to link initiatives, align effort, and allocate resources according to a solid innovation strategy.

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Business Model Canvas

D isruptive new business models are a sign of the times. They're the means by which companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Facebook are able to enter new markets with new streams of consumer value. And while they're highly visible and transformational, disruptive business models remain poorly understood.

Generating an innovative business model requires an entrepreneurial spirit paired with a rigorous search for ways to create and deliver new value, to replace, and displace, existing models. The search begins with understanding the nine key building blocks of any business model and how they work together to produce something of value that people will pay for, as identified in Alexander Osterwalder's co-created book Business Model Generation:

Customer Segments
Value Proposition
Channels
Customer Relationships
Revenue Streams
Key Resources
Key Activities
Key Partners
Cost Structure

The search, of course, concludes...never.

The EDIT Business Model Canvas workshop begins with mapping your current business model on a large printed canvas* that captures the nine key building blocks, then examining and ideating around that map to reveal future business model innovation opportunities.

The outcome is a complete "As Is" business model canvas for your existing business, and a separate "To Be" canvas revealing future innovation opportunities.

*Note: The Business Model Canvas is available under a Creative Commons License.

Download 1-Page Brochure

The choice is yours: innovate, or evaporate.

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Good ideas are everywhere. It's the ones that position you to win that are rare. Winning ideas have a few things in common. They achieve the maximum effect with the minimum means. They provide compelling customer value, often by subtracting something from the current experience—generally something viewed as excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly. And they break a pattern, a convention. Some people call that disruptive. They're right.

creativity to creation

EDIT offers three unique facilitated engagements to develop and launch winning new ideas. Each is designed to help turn ideas into reality: identifying opportunity spaces, framing problems properly, surfacing critical assumptions, solving complex problems at their root, and building a high-impact portfolio of hypotheses to be tested quickly with real customers and users through simple, rapid experiments with a minimally viable solution.

Open Hackathons

H ackathons, to the uninitiated, have moved well beyond the technology-only focus that "hack" conjures up, to become a valid method of bringing a diverse and passionate group of people together over a short time to solve real world problems.

New-school hackathons are no longer reserved for techies, programmers and coders--they draw designers, storytellers, marketers and entrepreneurs. Creativity is a contact sport, and having dozens of talented individuals rub shoulders and put their heads together is bound to produce something profound.

The only requirement: a passion for changing the world, if only in some small way.

Hackathons are close cousins to the Toyota jishuken--where a small team of masters work to solve a particular problem in a compressed timeframe...working straight through, often without sleep, until the problem is solved. Jishukens often last 48 hours or more.

A hackathon is a scaled up version of jishuken, set in an open environment, rather than closed. It's a mashup of jishuken intensity with the loose structure of Open Space Technology, whereby participants come together to work collectively on the things they are most passionate about.

Over the course of two days, participants first huddle around predetermined problem spaces, detailing as many issues and pain points as the strict time limit permits. From these many hundreds of issues, facilitators prepare affinity maps to pull patterns from the myriad, and constructing discreet problem statements. Teams self-organize, and the innovation effort begins. Teams present their solutions on the second, a panel of judges evaluate them against a set of well-defined criteria, and winners are declared.

High energy, high enthusiasm, high engagement abound…a perfect recipe for a well-stocked innovation pipeline.

Hackathons are generally private events, but public hackathons have become a popular means of solving high-altitude solutions to high-visibility challenges.

Either way, EDIT can help you organize and facilitate a successful hackathon for your company. For a detailed behind-the-scenes look at a recent hackathon, read our blog here and here, peruse our Portfolio here and here, and watch a a CBS special featuring a recent public hackathon we were involved in.

I.D.E.A. Loops

I nvestigate | Develop | Experiment | Adjust

I.D.E.A.!

Described in Matthew May's first book, The Elegant Solution: Toyota's Formula for Mastering Innovation, and close siblings to both W. Edward Deming's Plan | Do | Study, Act (PDSA) and Capt. John Boyd's fighter-pilot Observe | Orient | Decide | Act (OODA), IDEA Loops define the general phases of the learning cycle that precedes all innovation, to be carried out as quickly as possible in reiterating loops.

While terms are fairly self-explanatory, a little explanation is in order. Each learning phase is focused on answering a few key questions.

Investigate is conducting the fact-finding needed to fully assess the current situation and analyze the problem/opportunity. It usually entails a good bit of immersing yourself in the customer's problem, to ensure you're solving something they care about and recognize as a need, however unvoiced and unmet: What does the current situation look like—what do we know, what don't we know? What is the problem the customer really wants solved? Why does the problem exist—what's the real or root cause?

Develop is about painting a picture of what the world looks like if the problem is solved, and then generating and building up ideas that move you in that direction: What does the situation look like in the future if the problem is solved? What ideas exist for achieving that desired state? What is the best guess about a solution, and what minimally viable prototype can we use to quickly, cheaply, and effectively to validate our thinking?

Experiment is selecting an option or solution that holds promise, and conducting a rapid pilot to quickly test a minimally viable prototype, be it a service, product, feature, process or strategy: How will we rapidly test the solution? What do we expect will happen during that experiment? What is scope of impact, and what will we measure?

Adjust is the assess-and-tweek phase, where results are compared to the expected outcomes and measures, followed by a reiteration, or abandonment, of the proposed solution: What worked, what didn't, and why? Do we pivot or persevere? What adjustments must be made? What is the plan for reiterating?

The beauty of EDIT IDEA Loops is that they can apply to virtually any situations, in a flexible timeframe appropriate for the challenge at hand, but always as quickly, as inexpensively, and as intelligently as possible.

Deep Dives

T he most elegant and groundbreaking innovation often comes from simply getting out more, and walking in the customer's boots.

The reasons for innovation failure are many, but a prime suspect is that a wide gap exists between what’s offered and what the customer needs. In other words, the real problem doesn’t get solved. It happens all the time.

Why? Because the facts aren’t clearly understood. All too often, firms think they have a firm grip on the problem, that they know what the customer wants. They look at reams of marketing reports and conduct old-school focus groups. They ask customers what they want. But they fail to descend into the field and muck about in the weeds to see the problem in all its glory in a real-world setting.

Result? Failure to grasp the situation. Outcome? Innovating in the dark. It's risky, and fraught with waste.

The solution is simple: Learn to see. See the forest and the trees. Live the customer’s life. Watch the problem in the context and environment within which it occurs. View it from every conceivable angle. If you don’t, you’ll fail to properly frame the problem. You’ll fail to empathize with your customers. There goes deep understanding. There goes innovation with impact.

EDIT Deep Dives are a remedy. We guide you in utilizing our broad arsenal that includes a dozen high-impact techniques to facilitate a deep understanding of customer needs..the kind of understanding that gives rise to the surpassing insights that fuel winning innovation.

Whether you’re solving an internal process problem, designing a new product or service, handling a customer relations challenge, or creating a new marketing campaign, the ability to understand the situation intimately is key to solving the problem elegantly.

And that requires two things.

First, a thorough detective job. Taking a good hard look at the conditions surrounding the problem facilitates a complete investigation—the I in IDEA Loops. The goal is simple: facts.

Second, a deep dip in the customer experience. Maybe your customer is another department. Maybe it’s an actual consumer. Your job is to move beyond the level of police detective to that of FBI profiler. The goal isn’t easy: get inside the customer’s mind.

The phrase in Japanese is genchi genbutsu: go look, go see. Fully grasp the situation. See for yourself. Then, and only then, define the problem and design the appropriate solution. It's such a critical concept that Toyota holds it up as one of five non-negotiable company principles.

EDIT Deep Dives have their foundation in the Toyota innovation approach and design thinking as taught at Stanford's d school.

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T he EDIT approach to building a strong creative capability begins with a simple definition of innovation. As JetBlue founder David Neeleman says, "Innovation is figuring out a way to do something better than it's ever been done before."

finding a better way

But definitions aren't enough. And telling people to "go get creative" simply doesn't work. Research studies repeatedly show that traditional, unfocused brainstorming yields few if any new and novel ideas. Without a laserlike focus coupled with a sound ideation method structured to provoke new thought, the gravitational pull of pre-existing patterns and mindsets overpowers fresh, divergent thinking.

What's needed is a sound method, one designed to produce the escape velocity needed to allow participants to "blast off," see things in new ways, and break free from old thinking patterns and the natural tendency to revert to the safety of previous experiences. EDIT offers three workshops featuring leading creative methodologies:

Design Thinking

D esign thinking has moved rapidly to the forefront of the current business zeitgeist as a fresh take not just on how to rethink key products and services, but also how to reframe everyday processes and projects. With the ultimate goal of creating a companywide culture of constant creativity and collaboration, design thinking embeds a consistent innovation process across the organization. Blending creativity and logic in order to solve real business problems, design thinking turns everyone, irrespective of function or title, into a designer of sorts.

Based on the principles, tools and techniques developed and taught at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute, aka “the d. school,” the EDIT design thinking 1 half-day workshop gives participants hands-on exposure to the basic modes of design thinking:

Empathizing
Defining
Ideating
Testing

Participants first engage in a group innovation exercise which points out fatal flaws in conventional problem solving. With design thinking as the preferred approach, an everyday item or experience then gets redesigned by participants, culminating in a tested prototype of a minimally viable solution.

The EDIT design thinking 2 half-day workshop allows participants to dig deeper into some of the more powerful techniques and advanced tools associated with design thinking to build a stronger facility with seven key practices:

Observation
User personas
Customer journey maps
Problem statements
Ideation technique
Idea development
Idea pitching

Note: Taken back to back, EDIT design thinking 1 and EDIT design thinking 2 make an excellent full-day "crash course" immersion in design thinking.

Lean Thinking

I nnovation today demands the ability not only to create value, but to deliver that value through streamlined processes and seamless experiences. Simply flooding the market with overblown and overbuilt new products is not the answer. New-school innovation requires speed, agility and flexibility, and a strong discipline around the daily pursuit of "better."

Enter the EDIT lean thinking workshop.

Based on Toyota’s lean principles of workflow design and coupled with a rigorous continuous improvement methodology (aka "kaizen'), lean thinking is applicable to everything from internal process redesign to new product development and entrepreneurial startup.

Participants are first introduced to lean thinking through the official Toyota Production System (TPS) simulation developed during Matthew E. May's tenure at the University of Toyota to enable learners to actually experience lean principles in action. Participants engage in lean thinking principles such as:

andon (problem detection)
jidoka (problem prevention)
kanban (capacity control)
genchi genbutsu (observation)
5 Whys (cause analysis)
one-piece flow
just-in-time
takt time

The TPS simulation is followed by an exercise designed to identify problem and opportunity spaces based on real world issues facing the participants, in turning setting up a kaizen or kaikaku (radical innovation and change) session enabling participants to learn lean thinking tools and techniques by solving an actual problem.

Whether you're an entrepreneurial startup or mature company, whether you're designing a new product or rethinking a current process, the EDIT lean thinking course is invaluable.

Note: Designed to be a 1-day experience, the EDIT lean thinking workshop is easily customized to either a half-day (TPS simulation only), or a 2-day bootcamp for an intact teams in which the second day is a "Deep Dive" kaizen session aimed at solving a real problem facing the team.

Game Storming

Eye rolls and belly groans abound at the words that strike dread for business people everywhere: "Brainstorming meeting, 2 pm." Nothing is less fruitful than the traditional brainstorming meeting--people sitting in a room tossing out ideas, the vast majority of which represent nothing new, different, or better.

Yet we never cease to marvel at the ability of creative types--designers, writers, artists--to produce ideas that are magically all three. The truth is that most professional business people would rather leave creativity to the "creative types." Their ingenuity and process seems so mysterious.

Nothing is further from the truth. The reality is that consistently creative thinkers utilize simple methods, tools and techniques to shake concepts and connections loose from the idea tree. To even the most casual observer, their processes look far more like focused play than work. That's because they know that when we are playing, our minds are open, free, active and receptive to the creativity that lives inside all of us.

The secret to professional creativity is allowing the mind to play on a well-defined field focused on examining things deeply, exploring new directions, running experiments and testing hypotheses, all in an effort to generate new and surprising insights and results.

Enter "gamestorming," a much more accurate label than brainstorming. The EDIT gamestorming repertoire consists of a dozen categories brimming with tried-and-true ideation modules running the gamut of the innovation process.

Note: Gamestorming modules run approximately 90 minutes and are best used with one to three other modules to construct a half-day or full-day collaborative idea workshop focused on a single goal: mass quantities of new, different, and better ideas.

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Becoming Better Innovators