Introduction to the Innovation Sprint and a Lighthouse
Welcome to the introductory series into the Innovation Sprint.
This is the first story.
What is Innovation Sprint?
Innovation Sprint is an end-to-end commercial scientific continuous discovery process that allows teams to be data-empowered outcome-driven, define OKRs, align, discover, and quantify strong business opportunities, estimate, budget, run, and manage experiments in order to have a 90% success rate of commercial innovation. It combines state-of-the-art methods such as jobs-to-be-done from Harvard Business School, problem-solving and McKinsey way, consultative selling, experiments thinking, and opportunity trees of top product leaders and authors from Silicon Valley, and startup methods such as Lean and Design Sprint from Google.
Innovation is not luck or chaos. Innovation and commercial UX research is a clear, structured, and practical process. The future is predictable. Demand, unmet needs, opportunities, everything can be known upfront. Market segments are clearly defined and sized bottom-up. Product-market fit (PMF) is not found. It already exists. The future in business and commercial innovation is predictable in the same way you can pick an object in your hand above the ground and then release it. You know that this object will fall down because of the laws of physics. This is what Innovation Sprint is about. It combines different laws, science, and human nature together and makes the process simple and predictable.
UX research teams, young entrepreneurs and business owners, startups, product discovery teams, enterprise innovation teams, market research teams, consulting firms, and agencies. Wherever there is innovation, starting something new. Innovation Sprint can be used by anyone. At ATHENNO our mission is to make entrepreneurship and commercial innovation accessible and successful to all on Earth. Manage My Own Innovation Sprint for free.
Opportunity Prioritization Example
JTBD opportunity score, innovation triangle, innovation sprint, product prioritization and strategy example
Current problems managing UX and innovation, and what is the goal of Innovation Sprint
As of today, many organizations globally struggle to manage commercial innovation or UX research, track the ROI of discovery, and assemble the right teams. Then research teams and operational team members themselves struggle to perform the right experiments and tasks at the right time and provide updates to the leadership in a simple and understandable way. Innovation Sprint was designed to bring anyone together and become the initial stage in the process of innovation before the Design Sprint. Innovation Sprint absorbs Design Sprint and provides many types of experiments for different needs during the process.
A lot of complicated processes exist in big organizations, however, they might be too slow, inefficient, lack customer obsession, and alignment, and simply are too confusing and expensive to be accessible to small teams and startups. Innovation Sprint was designed to be simple and yet work at different scales. Teams still are able to be adapted it if needed.
Another problem is that people who are actually competent in decision-making, strategy, and affecting a roadmap, usually do not have this opportunity due to a HiPPO problem (highest-paid person’s opinion) or being too shy or introverted. Those are engineers, designers, and researchers. Innovation Sprint starts from a Lighthouse that gives anyone an equal chance to participate and affect the future of the company. The best ideas win. An Independent mechanism, such as an algorithm, is an important part of the Innovation Sprint to prevent human factors and biases.
The outcome of the Innovation Sprint is a decision tree or a table of:
Discovered, clearly defined, and tested different business opportunities where risk (ATHENNO Score) and ROI (Pre-Sales Potential) are known upfront and backed up by the undeniable evidence of existing demand.
And the list of framed and tested solutions that could address those opportunities in the best way to help people satisfy this demand better and better.
Teams can make a decision based on their current strategy and vision. It could be the opportunity with the highest pre-sales potential and lowest risk (highest ATHENNO Score), the solution experiment that yielded the highest satisfaction score, or the opportunity addressing the bigger market or opportunity with no direct competition.
If you are a young entrepreneur or want to become one, a new startup, starting a business you better find a niche, meaning - pick an opportunity with no direct competition because this will allow you to easily become a global expert in this niche, grow, gain more experience, resources, network, following, brand awareness and then you could go from there into something bigger and more competitive.
Core abstract layers and the steps in Innovation Sprint
Innovation Sprint has multiple core abstract layers. It is not the same clear step-by-step project management approach. It allows teams to be flexible and nimble and adapt to their situations for every project and market.
You can attach different methods next to each of those core abstract layers. You can not apply those layers directly in practice. Think of the goals layer where OKR is the method you use to define and measure goals.
There are four main layers or steps in Innovation Sprint:
Ideation and Goal-setting (Kick off Innovation Sprint with the Lighthouse)
Customer Panel or Lead generation/Pre-sales
Opportunities
Solution Experiments
Lighthouse, Ideation, and Goal-setting
No matter how you approach innovation, for everyone, it always starts from ideas or any other signals. Innovation Sprint helps you to bring abstract structure into your thinking.
At the top of this structure is Goal-setting which can be divided into 2 main steps:
Custom Research Repositories (Knowledge Base) that hold all your ideas, insights, market trends, etc. Simply put, those are quick ideas of all shapes and sizes. You don’t need to overthink here anything. If you came across an article that can be useful for your project, any piece of information both from within and outside, then you better add it to your Knowledge Base. Those are also your big questions and assumptions.
Goals themselves. The recommended method here is Objectives, Key Results, and Metrics (OKRMs)
Often it is hard to define clear outcomes and because of that teams end up defining poor OKRs or simply - outputs. This is because there is no context in front of everyone’s eyes. And also because ideas are scattered all around. Some notes are in Slack or Teams, others in Notion or Airtable, others in Miro or Mural, some in spreadsheets, in private notes, and so on.
Think for a second about how parliaments work. Many people need to present their thoughts and there is no time for everything. There is a procedure. Everyone has a few minutes to pitch. Then the next person and so on. An agenda is prepared upfront about who will be speaking first and who next. Topics have to be added to the agenda before the session.
In a similar way to parliament sessions, there is a Lighthouse in Innovation Sprint.
Lighthouse is the initial step in the Innovation Sprint where ideas are grouped together and picked to form a new goal or to be attached to an existing one.
Everyone can bring in ideas, and feedback and save different insights, trends, links, and other resources. However, Leadership shall drive the Lighthouse meeting. Every 1-3 months organize a Lighthouse meeting where ideas over the past months are quickly presented by their authors.
At this stage, ideas are very quick thoughts or saved resources. Don’t overthink. Move very quickly. The objective of the Lighthouse exercise and meeting is to define a clear goal as a team and only then figure out what is the opportunity. Opportunities are refined summarized ideas that contain uncovered insights backed by research and evidence. Solutions shall address these opportunities, NOT ideas.
Lighthouse has 2 steps.
The first one is individual exercise and preparation.
The second one is the Lighthouse Meeting itself.
Preparation for the Lighthouse:
Everyone who has some ideas or added any resources and wants to propose them or what the OKR shall look like...
Shall individually work on their proposed items and make sure the status for each item is “To Summarize / Present” or “To Take Action / Set a Goal”
(Please, don’t share tens of links, insights, and ideas in Slack every day, it only distracts the team and nobody will act upon it. Record all that instead in your knowledge repositories and then pitch your new ideas in the next Lighthouse meeting, even if you might have to wait for the next sprint)
During the Lighthouse Meeting:
Let anyone finalize their preparations and begin the Lighthouse exercise together.
Ideally, there shall be an independent 3rd party side or an algorithm that organizes the agenda and will already sort all insights based on multiple factors. Teams shall not waste time on organizing them and deciding who will be speaking first and next. This is to avoid any biases and HiPPO problem.
Start going through ideas at the top one by one. If you are going to take an action, check the box in this row and mark it under “To Take Action / Set a Goal”.
During a pitch, someone can take extra notes and update insights in the repository. The goal here is only to understand the idea, not to discuss it.
Only in the end, you might discuss which goals shall you have all together and what shall you take into this Innovation Sprint, or after the main meeting, leadership can discuss goals in detail and then let the team know about those goals. Finally, create a new OKR or attach selected items to an existing one. Ideas belong to the Objective (Goal) and not Key Results. That way you can create multiple KRs.
Optionally you can continue these steps again even during the same meeting. For example, to use other filters and create another goal.
If there are ideas left that you didn’t have time for, you might keep them in “To Summarize/Present” and go through them during the next meeting. If there were ideas that you are not going to move forward with, you can forget/archive them. For example, if you had similar ideas, you could merge them together, or if something is absolutely out of scope for your organization.
The outcome of the Lighthouse and the next steps:
After a goal is defined, the team can break the goal down into more detailed steps and experiments in order to test all the ideas, and assumptions. Then use this evidence to define very specific Market Groups or Segments. Then form business Opportunities backed by real evidence and simple business modeling and market research.
Or, in other cases, where you just have ideas to improve an existing solution, then you might attach insights to an existing goal and then either create a new solution or improve an existing one. That way team will break down that Solution into experiments and tasks, and not Opportunities. This is true only for cases where opportunity is already defined and evidence collected. If the idea is new, additional research shall be performed, and a new opportunity identified.
Ideas vs Opportunities, Idea-First vs Opportunity-First
Ideas and any other insights such as market trends, feedback posted on social media, social listening, and insights from analytics are just quick assumptions. Think of signals on your radar. Points of interest on the map. But you don’t actually know if there is an iceberg somewhere and an island with a treasure that is not yet on the map.
Opportunity - is a formed commercial idea backed by strong evidence in a clear market with a clear path towards benefits, such as revenues or whatever impact.
Ideas shall never be acted upon directly.
A common mistake many teams do and why they struggle with being more successful or being a modern data-empowered outcome-based organization is that they jump quickly from ideas to execution without knowing for sure what will happen.
The Idea-First approach is very dangerous. It doesn’t work. You will be getting low success rates, high risks, inefficiency, and a waste of time and resources.
Instead, be Opportunity-First where outcomes are a north star that guides teams towards what domain shall they focus on and what types of opportunities they should be discovering.
You have to understand, that in discovery, especially at an early stage a lot of work will be exploratory. That means, you never know what exactly you can discover upfront. So you need some outcome to focus, keep your mind wide open, and be flexible. Because even new themes of opportunities can be discovered, that you didn’t think of at first.
Think of it as giving your team a specific old map to find and get to a treasure VS telling them to find a treasure, here is one path we know, but, please, feel free to find a better path.
If you keep doing what you are doing, you will be getting the same results. You become what you repeatedly do and you act how you think. Change your mindset. Adapt your systems in order to get better results tomorrow.
Themes
Opportunities, goals, and ideas can be related to a theme.
A theme is a group of opportunities or problems or a specific subset of a particular domain or even a category of the target market.
Think of themes as agile epics for solutions/features, but in discovery space and for business.
Like opportunities, themes shall not touch solution space at all.
If you have a fintech or banking application with a travel aspect, your themes could be “Travel”, “Digital Nomads”, “Saving”, “Core Banking”, “Accounting”, “Gen Z”, “Education”, “Credit Score”, “Budgeting”, etc.
Solution Experiments vs Solutions
The common misconception is that you have to build a full MVP, launch a working feature, or spend months and resources doing high-level work actually getting something out of the door.
There is a huge difference between solution experiments and solutions.
Everything always is an experiment. Even if you are an expert. Even if you know what you want. Treat everything as a learning opportunity and not a task. Test and measure vs do. Experimentation is the core of scientific thinking and the scientific method is the core of innovation and discovery. It’s a lens and a mindset. You continue doing what you are doing already, but with a different mindset.
Solution Experiments are experiments that bridge opportunity space and solution space, but not the actual solution space.
Think of what would be the minimum number of resources you would need in order to test your assumptions and gain more physical evidence in relation to a particular prototype of a sketch. In order to learn as much as possible. Learning moving into solution space shall be clearly seen in a practical way, usually in a way of traction or absence of it.
There are many different types of experiments and also different categories of experiments for different core layers of Innovation Sprint. For example, you will not be performing JTBD analysis in the solution space, and you will not be performing usability tests in the opportunity space.
Run as many little experiments and as often, as quickly as you can. Minimize the feedback loop.
You can easily run 10 experiments a week and even a day.
The faster you learn, the faster you earn.
Opportunity vs Experiment
There is often a confusion between opportunities and experiments, and I’ve seen people treating opportunities as hypotheses.
Let’s start from a definition from a vocabulary. Opportunity is a time or set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.
In Innovation Sprint opportunity also means business opportunity specifically. So opportunity means certain circumstances that are already in place that allow teams to make a powerful business decision.
We already addressed the difference between ideas and opportunities. Opportunities must have evidence. Ideas - don’t. Opportunity is a clear and safe strategic path forward.
Hence opportunity is not a hypothesis or assumption by itself. Hypothesis is part of the scientific method and experimentation only.
Experiments and tasks can be under each of the core abstract layers of the Innovation Sprint.
You go to the next layer by doing certain types of tasks or running certain types of experiments for this particular layer.
Experiment always is first. Research. Observations. All that always will be first before opportunity can be formulated.
Usuaully, you start from a clear objective and a desired outcome (key result) and then you form different hypotheses for each experiment that will help you discover opportunities in the first place. Experiment under goal comes first before opportunity is created.
However, it is fine to quickly add opportunity assumption at the beginning, but there must be an experiment that shall discover any evidence to support this initial opportunity assumption. In ATHENNO, for example, you will see a warning that evidence and/or market is missing, if opportunity is not ready for decision making.
Plan your experiment and research first. Then run it. Log observations. Analyze findings. Summarize.
Now you have clarity to help you clearly define and quantify opportunities as a result of experimentation.
Customer Panel or Lead generation/Pre-sales
Pay attention to a golden layer in front of both opportunities and solution experiments.
For early-stage businesses, this is your Pre-sales and Leag-gen work. Even for existing organizations - if you are considering new markets.
Later this shall be a Customer Panel.
Customer Panel - is the Mini-CRM for research which contains information such as behavior, unmet needs, psychometrics, related and past experiments about most loyal users, customers, potential customers, partners, community members, and anyone else who could provide valuable feedback to research team so research team could reach out to them directly.
Continuous Discovery is different from discovery because it is about doing it every week. Again and again. Not once in a while.
In order to be continuous, you have to touch base with your customers and users all the time.
You might have to recruit participants for interviews, surveys, and other types of experiments.
As an executive, think of this - you are hiring or assembling a research team. Will they have people to interview, survey, and do all sorts of tests with quickly?
Unfortunately, the reality right now is that it is not that easy and quick for research teams to do their job well.
If they can’t reach out to someone right away, they will be wasting time and - resources. And no, they not gonna search for data in your Salesforce themselves. Moreover, typical sales CRMs do not contain the information research teams need and are very complicated.
For early-stage startups, this situation is even worse. You have to start with experiment types such as Fake Door Tests, create fake landing pages with sketches of your potential solution, and try to get some early traction, sign-ups into the community, or a waiting list. As a founder, introduce your network, and early adopters to your research team and organize this Mini-CRM in a spreadsheet, a tool like Notion, or in a modern E2E research platform for continuous discovery and innovation like ATHENNO where contacts with a green checkmark indicating that they are members of the Customer Panel.
As a user yourself, think of many products you’ve been using. Have you ever had a feeling when you struggled with something and would like to provide your ideas to the team, but nobody ever reaches out to you? There are people who would be happy to provide you with valuable insights and be on Customer Panel for free. And you don’t need to recruit participants and pay them.
Start building your Customer Panel as soon as possible.
You can automatically grow your existing Customer Panel / Mini-CRM by automating the recruiting process. For example, you can add intercept surveys and bookings inside your product, community, and social media to ask users if they would be interested to talk to you or your team.
Collaborate, co-create with and for your potential and existing customers every week
Maturity of the Innovation Sprint
The more we progress down the Innovation Sprint, the higher maturity of the sprint we are getting.
That means - more ideas/tasks/experiments down the road shall be closer to solution space. Only actual experiments and tasks in the end without any new ideas. And ideas are moving from big ones in the beginning to more specific ones down the road.
We are shifting from one category and one layer of experiments to another. For example, we are shifting our ideation and research from a JTBD analysis to a Fake Door Test to a Usability Test to a Launched Prototype Test.
Never the other way around.
What roles and skills do we need for Innovation Sprint?
Innovation Sprint can be performed by just one person with less structure and speed. It is a recommended way of approaching entrepreneurship and starting a new business.
Sprint can also be performed by 2-3 people. This is common in consulting where teams are very small, but the elite. Or in product companies - product trios, PM, engineer, and a designer.
Finally, larger organizations can have 5 and no more than 10 people for Innovation Sprint.
Anyway, it is not about the quantity, but about the quality and who can do different roles.
Roles will depend on your market and industry.
But there always shall be the main facilitator - innovation or discovery manager or consultant. Usually, you don’t need someone full-time to facilitate the sprint, and bringing an external expert can help you to avoid biases and HiPPO problem, lack of expertise on your team, as well as bring in more knowledge across the spectrum and powerful problem-solving. Think of this facilitator as a Scrum Master in Scrum in the solution space.
This person could be the main decision maker, the Outcome Leader of Innovation Sprint, or it could be another person, for example, a client, or a CEO, e.g. Product Owner in Scrum. However, there is no need for a dedicated decision-maker because the best ideas and experiment results shall win and ideas can come from anyone. THE evidence itself shall be the main decision-maker in order to, again, avoid biases.
Then besides that, you would need someone who can research (in general and on the opportunity side):
Conduct JTBD interviews or perform any relevant for your project type of research, talk to users and customers
Analyze findings and perform JTBD or other types of analyses
Do basic market, trends, and competitive research (and bottom-up market sizing, which is usually done at the end of JTBD analysis)
Do quick business modeling (i.e. via profit trees) and budgeting
Usually, research teams are not good at recording all their observations, and logs and tracking status updates themselves, so you might have a facilitator doing this or have a dedicated innovation project manager.
Finally, on the solution experimentation side (this one will be more different for different organizations depending on the industry, but let’s cover a typical digital app as an example):
Someone who can design a system on top of UX design for a solution, how it could work approximately, and what architecture could be like. Someone to tell what resources would be needed and what it could cost.
Someone who can implement this solution experiment. Could be a UI or 3D designer, a low-code developer, a 3D printer, a copywriter, a sales rep, whoever else.
Lab - while it is not a person, but an environment, it also is a crucial component of Innovation Sprint. If you are a small team building a new digital app, you might not need a lab because you could do everything in one online tool remotely. However, if it is, for example, a self-driving car, or construction, or manufacturing type of business, then someone who actually will be implementing experiments will need resources and a place, a playground, for that.
If that involves legal and compliance, then that lab shall have that covered.
The most important part to understand is that in Innovation Sprint teams are always cross-functional and outcome, opportunity, and data-driven. Those are not just product squads, and definitely not traditional waterfall teams divided by function. Think of Innovation Team as an independent self-sustainable combat unit in the military. In Innovation Sprint both business and product roles will be working together as one team. If you just have a research team, then you are not doing commercial innovation, but UX research, nothing more. UX or product teams can’t discover business opportunities and run a lot of solution experiments alone.
Team members running successful Innovation Sprints must have those core attributes and skills:
Limitless curiosity, addiction to new knowledge, and ability to search for information, learn, understand quickly, synthesize, decompartmentalize, and use First Principles Thinking. Strong problem-solving ability. Seeking to understand why things happen the way they happen and diving into the root cause of the problem. Understand underlying laws and principles.
Customer obsession, empathy, and people who love to get in touch with customers, listen to them and understand their struggles, problems, and needs, and serve them well. People who can do interviews, surveys, UX research, know behavioral science, and JTBD analysis. Those people must be aware of many biases and trained to make independent and sound decisions, not what they think is true or pushing personal agendas. That means that assigning a person who came up with an idea to this particular experiment without partnering this teammate with an independent researcher might yield confirmation bias.
Great imagination, creativity, and people who can come up with many ideas quickly. For that, they have to have a lot of life experience such as travel, history, and being exposed to many cultures.
Good intuition. Entrepreneurial and growth mindset, go-getters who thrive in the balance between chaos and structured order. People who don’t need to be told what to do. Typical workers at factories or in development without that ability might not be able to discover something new and think outside the box since they need a structured process and a manager to be productive.
Rebellious spirit in the sense that those people must challenge the status quo and don’t live by what is considered common. Innovation is not possible in strict and regulated environments. Strategy in innovation comes from these people and the top-down approach will never work. You always will have to break some rules to find something new. Empower your Innovation, Research, and Discovery teams and find people who can make new rules and push humankind forward.
At least basic knowledge of scientific method, statistics, hypothesis testing, market research, profit trees, and business modeling.
Ability to explain and present complicated findings and data visually to stakeholders.
How long Innovation Sprint takes and what is the recommended schedule?
Usually, Innovation Sprint takes at least a month to go through. Experiment and see what works best for your situation, your culture, your resources, and the org size. It shall not take you more than 3 months (a quarter) though. Ideally, you want to do it as fast as you can.
The recommended structure is (adapt to your needs):
Week 1 - Monday and Tuesday everyone has time to finalize previous work, sprint, and prepare their ideas for the Lighthouse meeting on Wednesday. On Wednesday - kick off the innovation sprint and define clear and measurable outcomes for the sprint.
Week 2 - From the previous Wednesday till next Wednesday let teams do early research in order to discover initial business opportunities and prepare assumptions, hypotheses, and questions. This week’s Wednesday weekly innovation call (or meeting) is for final questions about goals, brainstorming possible opportunities and solutions, and presenting any research findings if there are strong ones already.
Week 3 - Continue in opportunity space maximum of 2 weeks. (Could be done in the previous week). Week 3 Wednesday meeting - present final opportunities backed by strong evidence and potential solution experiments with everything estimated and sized. After that no more opportunity space. Get into the solution experimentation phase as soon as possible. This is where you can run Opportunity Lighthouse to pitch final opportunities and pick which ones you will be moving into the solution experimentation phase.
Week 4 - Start working on solution experiments, run them, and log observations. Depending on the type of experiment 1-2 weeks is usually enough. For A/B tests, for example, at least 2 weeks is recommended. Prototype usability tests could be done in one week. Week 4 Wednesday meeting presents status updates, satisfaction scores, and any other relevant metrics for each solution experiment at the moment.
Week 5 - Before the final Wednesday of the Innovation Sprint prepare all the reports for each solution experiment and run a Solution Lighthouse and decide if there is any solution you would like to actually move forward with and launch. Those insights then will go into the development team where another process will take care of the rest.
Innovation Triangle
At the core of the Innovation Sprint sits the Innovation Triangle with these 3 sides:
Need - what is the unmet need many people have?
Market (and business model) - is this needed in a large growing market with less competition where we can make more money with less input?
Ease - can we easily address this opportunity?
Innovation Triangle helps bring structure to the opportunity discovery, its definition, evidence, evaluation, and prioritization. Essentially it becomes the ATHENNO Score that helps organizations understand which opportunities are more or less risky.
Need:
You start from the top of the triangle by seeking to answer the question - what many people need right now? Now what they say or might want in the future. This shall be scientific proof of already existing demands and unmet needs. As of today, there is no better way to answer this question than a JTBD analysis.
This is where you will calculate the main Opportunity Score from 0 to 10 to help you evaluate mathematically which needs are more demanding and which - less, for the majority. Insights can come from different sources such as analytics, industry reports, trends, and interviews.
When you start, you won’t have any evidence for your opportunities, ideas, or big assumptions. Define opportunity space experiments to validate those hypotheses and gain undeniable evidence for each opportunity.
Market:
Then you continue into the next corner of the triangle into Market Score.
If you are doing JTBD analysis, you define a market as a group of people with similar characteristics + same job they need to get done with the same personal outcome metrics that they value the most. So you can clearly see your target market for this opportunity and perform quick market, competitive research, and bottom-up market sizing. At this stage, you don’t have to do McKinsey-level work. Quickly estimate more accurate numbers that represent this potential market, segment, or niche. They still will be mostly assumptions, and this is totally fine.
Now you have core metrics such as CAGR, how many people you could reach, ARPU, and on another side - how competitive the space is and what could be CAC and Churn Rate. You then can combine all these metrics into a Market Score to help you evaluate different markets with another number between 0 and 10.
Ease:
Finally, when you have more clarity on what the need actually is, who has it, and what the market looks like, you then, during the Opportunity Lighthouse meeting, can evaluate quickly how easy it could be to address each of the opportunities with your current resources, expertise, unfair advantage, constraints, etc. Quickly put Ease Score between 0 and 10.
ATHENNO Score (Risk) & Pre-Sales Potential (ROI)
All evaluation metrics in the Innovation Sprint and Opportunity table (seen above) are on a scale from 0 to 10 apart from the Pre-Sales Potential which indicates the $ amount that could be gained in a year if the opportunity would be addressed 100%.
ATHENNO Score is not a prioritization framework or a matrix like a RICE score, for example. It is a reflection of the current state of the actual work and research. You can’t get ATHENNO Score on your own. You have to go out and perform, for example, a JTBD analysis, interviews and run many experiments, and record observations, as well as perform basic market, competitive research, and business modeling. Only Ease Score (at this moment) is put manually and quickly.
Components of the ATHENNO Score come from the Innovation Triangle:
Opportunity Score - Do many people have this demand now?
Market Score - Is the market growing with less competition and can we make $?
Ease Score - Can we execute better than anyone else, do we have an unfair advantage?
ATHENNO Score (or the Main Innovation Score) is a weighted average of Opportunity, Market, and Ease scores. It sits at the intersection of the Innovation Triangle and answers the question: “How risky or not risky a particular opportunity is?” (based on the current maturity of the sprint and the state of the research)
Finally, Pre-Sales Potential answers the question “What is the ROI, what can we gain in the future if we will decide to move forward with this opportunity?”
Two core metrics of the Innovation Sprint are Risk and ROI. The higher the ATHENNO Score is and closer to 10, the lower the risk. And the higher the Pre-Sales Potential, the bigger the impact/ROI will be.
Pre-Sales Potential (PSP) is the most common metric for businesses, however, think in general of just an Impact Metric. What ROI are you seeking? For non-profits and governments instead of PSP it could be something like “# of people we could educate” or poverty alleviation or building houses for the homeless, whatever.
Know your risks and ROI and have clear evidence, and different paths forward before even starting to write the first line of code or digging a hole for a foundation for a new city.
Think of innovation as an opportunity and a decision tree and not a linear roadmap. This tree and Innovation Sprint IS your roadmap. If the particular opportunity is not going well, or a particular solution, what will you do next? You will shift to the adjacent branch in the same decision tree or go level up and start again.
The only limit is your imagination.
You can run your own Innovation Sprint and bring your entire team into one place in ATHENNO for free.
Innovation Sprint, ATHENNO Score & Market Score were created by Mev-Rael around 2019. Its current state was formed in 2022.
The core abstract structure of the Innovation Sprint took some inspiration from the Continuous Discovery Habits and Opportunity Solution Tree by Teresa Torres.
Opportunity Score for JTBD was created by Tony Ulwick. However, different experiments might require a different formula and JTBD isn’t everywhere.
Lighthouse name was given by Myra Nizami, a Qualitative Research Consultant in London
