Innovation Management

Explore tools for developing ideas and systematically teasing out customer requirements, then examine requirements gathering, design thinking, and the Kano model.

Explore how customer requirements drive innovation by focusing on the individual user and requirements engineering. Reduce feature bloat and manage risk by applying the rule of ten to prevent recalls.

Define requirements engineering, distinguish functional and non-functional requirements, and write them explicitly to minimize risk. Use empirical methods—interviews, contextual inquiry, observation, surveys—and align with Maslow's needs and megatrends.

Identify the right target groups that fit our offer, pay, and enable long-term profitability. Use personas and a persona canvas to refine positioning and learn from rejections.

Explore design thinking as a visual-haptic, user-centered approach to generate innovative ideas, define problems, prototype rapidly, and iteratively test with customers to refine solutions.

Prototype early using simple materials to visualize interfaces and processes in design thinking, then iterate with user feedback to turn ideas into tangible solutions.

Apply the Kano model to elicit, categorize, and prioritize customer requirements into basic, performance, and excitement factors. Learn to design surveys and interpret results to guide product decisions.

Explore the long-term customer life cycle and how to engage at each stage with digital marketing, a strong web store experience, and loyalty initiatives to drive recurring revenue.

Explore building a functioning business model from ideas using lean startup concepts, launching a minimum viable product to gain early revenue and feedback for full model development.

Define vision, mission, and target systems; translate mental images into measurable parameters; set explicit, flexible objectives guided by why, product goal, and stakeholder workshops.

Explore how to distinguish vision from mission with the product vision board, then translate the vision into concrete actions using a product canvas and key performance indicators.

Define the big picture through scenarios and story mapping, detailing a product canvas with design ideas, storyboards, and a customer journey to create a roadmap.

Apply the lean startup approach to digital business models, detailing what to offer, who to target, how to deliver, value, monetization, scalability, and the primacy of sales.

Explore the lean startup cycle from minimum viable product to iterative customer feedback. See how the business model canvas and related tools test hypotheses and guide market entry.

Craft a detailed value proposition canvas aligned with the customer segment, mapping tasks, pain points, and persona to structure all aspects of the offer for each segment and maximize benefits.

Explore the business model canvas to map key partners, activities, resources, value proposition, customer segments, sales channels, customer relationships, costs, and revenues, illustrated by an IT trainer example.

Assess due diligence by clarifying the business idea and customer problem. Evaluate market potential, unique selling points, technical solution readiness, revenue scalability, risks, and team.

Identify and manage entrepreneurial risk in new business models by estimating probabilities and losses, applying ROAM and a failure-mode design review, plus 5-Why analysis to mitigate and accept residual risks.

Learn to craft crowdfunding pitches that evoke emotion, present novelty, and blend facts with storytelling and visuals using ethos–logos–pathos for investors.

Discover how large companies manage the innovation process and the special processes that support corporate innovation.

Apply the stage gate process to steer innovation in large companies through five phases: strategy, ideation, evaluation, incubation, and market launch, balancing resources, customer needs, and risk.

Large companies implement incubators, accelerators, think tanks, and open innovation approaches to drive disruptive innovation, separated by a firewall from day-to-day business to avoid resource conflicts.

Explore a range of digital business models, emphasizing diversity and inspiration for your own ideas, since no universal recipes guarantee success.

Analyze platform models across social media, marketplaces, and learning platforms, from ads and premium memberships to content hosting and commission-based revenue.

Automate internal company processes with software bots that handle boring, repetitive tasks, improving accuracy and freeing capacity through process mining and testing for scalable automation.

Explore artificial intelligence concepts and cloud and edge computing in digital business models, with uses in object recognition in video, speech recognition, security, healthcare, retail visitor counting, and autonomous driving.