As innovation leaders, we’re drowning in frameworks. The Three Horizons, Business Model Canvases, Stage-Gates… we know them all.
In this article you’ll drown even more… At least to some extent.
The focus in this article is to give you fresh perspectives on the common-known tools to help you align strategy, governance, and execution.
I’ve collected frameworks from around the industry and academia to give you some more spiced up versions of the tools you already know and some practical ideas to help you along the way.
These are grouped in layers based on your function as an innovation manager. I’ll also rank each tool based on practicality and novelty. When novelty is low, an expert won’t get so much out of it. But fear not, dear expert, it’ll progress so I recommend you read along and maybe skip the first couple of points.
Innovation Tools at a Glance
Layer 1: The strategic core
The strategic core ensures that your innovation portfolio becomes a direct expression of your corporate strategy rather than a collection of super-fun-to-run-easy-to-maintain-good-for-marketing projects. I’ve created this layer to focus on a common innovation problem: connecting innovation to actual business results, especially goal-setting and resource allocation.
The LEGO Innovation Matrix
Practicality: 5/5
Novelty: 3/5
Copyright: The Wharton School
What is it
The LEGO Innovation Matrix was developed by Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and his team during LEGO’s transformation from near-bankruptcy to market leadership. You probably know the framework, but it’s an important mention.
The matrix has four dimensions:
- Product Offering,
- Business Model,
- Marketing Communication, and
- Enabling Processes
Each of these are then assessed from incremental improvement to redefining the category.
Why it matters
It’s intuitive, which is why it’s so useful for making executive teams agree on resource allocation priorities faster. By providing a simple, shared language to discuss the different types of innovation, it cuts through complexity and helps achieve C-suite consensus on strategic direction.
How to use it
Don’t just use it statically as a mapping exercise. Use the matrix to strategically align with C-levels at the beginning of strategic planning sessions. Presenting it as an “appetizer” can create a common ground and shared understanding, which allows you to move on to deeper, more complex portfolio discussions later with everyone on the same page.
A contractual 3 Horizons Model
Practicality: 4/5
Novelty: 4/5
What is it
Traditional ambition matrices and three horizons models can sometimes become a bit ‘static’ and gather dust after quarterly reviews.
I’ve thought a bit further and added the idea of a contract. It awakens this familiar framework by focusing on connecting it with the C-suite. Instead of just plotting projects on a 2×2 grid, you focus on creating contractual commitments for budget and talent allocation across innovation horizons.
Why it matters
This framework moves beyond descriptive mapping to prescriptive resource allocation, which turns a strategic picture into a binding agreement.
The power lies not in the specific percentages, like the McKinsey-recommended 70-20-10 split, but in the explicit agreement on measurement criteria and success metrics for each horizon, ensuring resources truly follow strategic intent.
How to use it
To use it, begin by mapping your current innovation portfolio against the three horizons, but immediately pivot to resource allocation discussions. Present this to the C-suite not as “here’s where our projects are” but as “we are committing X% of our resources to each horizon, aligned with our growth targets.”
Then define specific success metrics for each horizon and establish review cycles to assess both the performance of the project overall and how effectively you’ve allocated resources for it.
Foresight-driven artifacts from the future
Practicality: 4/5
Novelty: 5/5
What is it
Some foresight efforts produce dense reports that executives skim and teams ignore. Artifacts from the Future makes abstract futures tangible by having teams create physical or digital objects from a potential future.
Rather than presenting just trend analyses, you can bring them to life with things like mocked-up Amazon product pages for 2030 offerings, simulated customer support chat transcripts, or fabricated Wall Street Journal articles announcing major industry shifts. The Institute for the Future can be an inspiration for this.
Why it matters
This approach solves the “so what” problem of strategic foresight by making abstract scenarios more emotionally clear for your team and executives. Instead of a dry report that gets forgotten, these artifacts can work as a North Star that people can see and feel, which drives deeper alignment and motivation for long-term projects.
How to use it
Give innovation teams the task of creating specific artifacts rather than producing foresight reports. Begin with a clear future scenario (5-10 years out) and ask teams to create three types of artifacts:
- customer-facing materials (product packaging, user interfaces, marketing materials),
- internal documents (employee handbooks, process guides, performance metrics), and
- external validation (media coverage, analyst reports, regulatory documents).
These artifacts can then work as North Stars for Horizon 2 and 3 projects.
Layer 2: Execution
Strategy is useless if it stays in a slide deck. I’m focusing here on closing the gap between the boardroom map and your execution. We’re focused on tools that inject speed, discipline, and validated learning into your projects.
The PR/FAQ Document (Amazon’s Working Backwards)
Practicality: 5/5
Novelty: 3/5
What is it
Amazon’s Working Backwards process has generated most of the company’s major products since 2004, from AWS to Alexa. The PR/FAQ serves as both a pre-mortem and alignment tool, requiring teams to write a press release (PR) and a frequently asked questions (FAQ) document before committing any resources to a new idea.
Why it matters
At first glance, this might sound like the Artifacts from the Future, but they’re not the same. Artifacts are exploratory, generative, and help you imagine possible scenarios while PR/FAQ is evaluative, convergent, and forces you to make sharp decisions before developing the product.
PR/FAQ forces customer-centricity from the absolute beginning and helps a team to achieve clarity on the customer’s problem, their solution, and potential business hurdles before any significant investment is made.
How to use it
To use it, establish the PR/FAQ as a mandatory “ticket to ride” for any new innovation initiative. Begin with the press release, written as if the product has already launched successfully, focusing on customer benefits rather than features.
The PR should be no more than one page and include a compelling headline, customer problem statement, solution description, and customer testimonials.
Follow with an FAQ that addresses external questions (pricing, availability, technical specifications) and internal questions (market size, competitive landscape, resource requirements, risks).
Iterate this document until it achieves clarity and alignment across stakeholders before any development begins.
The Opportunity Solution Tree
Practicality: 5/5
Novelty: 4/5
Copyright: ProductPlan
What is it
Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree makes the connection between high-level business outcomes and day-to-day experimentation. This visual framework helps product teams explore the path from desired business outcomes through customer opportunities to potential solutions and experiments.
The framework starts with a clear outcome at the top, branches into opportunities that could drive that outcome, and lastly extends to potential solutions for addressing those opportunities. It concludes with specific experiments to test solution assumptions.
Why it matters
It is effective in preventing your teams from jumping directly to their pet solutions and forces them to visualize and challenge their logic at every step. This structure ensures that every team member can always articulate exactly how their current experiment connects back to the ultimate business goal, creating a direct line-of-sight from daily work to strategy.
How to use it
To use it, begin by defining a single, measurable outcome that represents business value (e.g., “Increase user retention by 15% in Q3”). Next, map the opportunity space by understanding customer needs, pain points, and desires that could drive that outcome. You can then structure this using customer journey mapping or jobs-to-be-done.
For each key opportunity, you should then brainstorm multiple solution options and design specific assumption tests or experiments to quickly evaluate which solutions show the most promise. The key is maintaining the visual tree, ensuring that every team member can always articulate exactly how their current experiment connects back to the ultimate business goal.
Learning-Gate Governance (A take on Stage-Gate)
Practicality: 3/5
Novelty: 5/5
What is it
This is a take on the traditional Stage-Gate process, which was designed more for predictable development, and less uncertain innovation. Instead of asking teams for precise, fictional business cases at each gate, you can instead try and focus more on evidence. Teams identify their riskiest assumptions, share the experiments they’ve run, and present the evidence they’ve gathered.
Why it matters
Traditional Stage-Gate processes can sometimes kill innovation by demanding predictive business cases for inherently uncertain endeavors. The result? Risk is pushed underground, learning is sidelined, and innovation becomes a spreadsheet exercise.
Learning-Gate Governance can shift the conversation from “Are your projections accurate?” to “What have you learned, and how does that change our confidence in this opportunity?” This turns governance from a barrier into an accelerator for innovation.
How to use it
To use it, you can replace your early-stage business case templates with assumption maps and learning objectives. Turn your gate reviews into checkpoints where you make teams present their “learning velocity” and evidence.
You can then meter out funding based on how effectively teams reduce uncertainty, not how closely they stick to their original plan. This is how you shift reviewers from being gatekeepers demanding impossible forecasts to being investors in learning, turning governance from a barrier into an accelerator.
Layer 3: Scaling
Scaling addresses a common failure point for corporate innovation: the handoff from innovation teams to business operations. This layer focuses on making innovations successfully transition from proof-of-concept to scaled impact.
The Venture Client Model with a “Scaling Contract”
Practicality: 3/5
Novelty: 4/5
What is it
The venture client model positions you as a customer for startup innovations, providing them with real-world validation while giving your company early access to emerging tech. However, often, engagements die in pilot purgatory. An idea could be to employ a “Scaling Contract”.
It’s a simple, conditional agreement: “IF the startup achieves [specific, measurable pilot metrics], THEN the business unit commits to [a defined scaling action, like a master service agreement or a full rollout].” This forces the critical scaling conversations before the pilot launches, not after. Companies like BMW and Cencosud Ventures use similar approaches to structure their venture client relationships for success.
Why it matters
This contract forces you and the business unit to have the critical scaling conversations before the pilot launches, not after. It prevents pilots from becoming dead-end science projects by creating a clear, pre-agreed path to impact, holding both the startup and your internal business partners accountable for success.
How to use it
To use it, identify a specific business challenge suitable for a startup partnership. Then, create a three-party agreement between your innovation team, the startup, and the receiving business unit. This contract must define the pilot scope, the success metrics, and the pre-agreed scaling commitments.
Ensure the metrics are tied to the business unit’s actual needs, not generic innovation KPIs. This transforms a fun experiment into a strategic business development initiative with a clear path to impact.
Scaling Readiness Framework
Practicality: 3/5
Novelty: 4/5
What is it
This framework focuses on the handoff problem between innovation teams and business units. It does so by creating a shared definition of “done” from day one. Instead of treating scaling as a final exam the project might fail, you build a collaborative roadmap for success.
The framework assesses innovations across multiple dimensions:
- Technical Readiness (Does it work reliably?)
- Market Readiness (Is there proven demand?)
- Organizational Readiness (Do we have the skills and processes to support it?)
- Ecosystem Readiness (Are partners and regulations in place?)
Why it matters
By involving the receiving business units in defining these criteria and tracking progress quarterly, you eliminate the adversarial “not invented here” dynamic that kills so many projects.
How to use it
To use it, begin a scaling readiness assessment at the project launch. Collaborate with the receiving business unit to define what “scaling ready” means across all relevant dimensions.
Then hold quarterly reviews where both the innovation team and the business unit jointly assess progress, identify gaps, and create plans to close them. This makes scaling an integrated design constraint from the beginning, not an afterthought, dramatically increasing the odds of a successful transition.
Conclusion
So, are you drowning yet?
Using tools from within these ‘layers’: core, execution, and scaling can help you create strategic alignment between your innovation and your business goals. While there are countless other frameworks you can use, we believe these provide some relevant new insight and help you think a bit more creatively about how to create this alignment.
An important reminder is that you can’t just fill these out as templates. Your job is mainly having the hard conversations, aligning the right stakeholders, and connecting your actions back to strategic value.
