Goal: To help corporate innovation mature into a craft respected by all

Or, to put in "HMW" form: How might innovation leaders earn secure, valued roles and impact for their teams in their organization? (We sure aren’t there yet.)


Top-level overview

Credible Innovation is a method and toolkit for doing better innovation work, mainly in existing organizations, but also in startups and beyond. It supplements common innovation toolkits like Lean Startup and Human-centered Design.

Of course the entire site is about achieving Credible Innovation. So much more is yet to come. There are also different considerations for the specific needs of leaders, doers, and startups.

But a basic framework sits at the core of it all.

In short, achieving credibility in innovation work takes the following components, at minimum:

  • Must-do purpose: Critical, urgently-needed, and set up for success
  • Usable outputs: Complete, understandable, and usable beyond ventures
  • Impressive craft: Selectively-awesome, fast, efficient
  • Unpretentious team: Open-eyed, skilled, humble

The "Credible Innovation" framework in line-art form, as described in words below
The core "Credible Innovation" framework. Most everything else here ladders up to this.

Yeah, this will surely evolve. After all, even this is version 4.10 (as of March 11, 2023). But it's “right” until I realize that–and how–it needs to change yet again.

You can read about the background and rationale for this work

More about the framework itself and about its individual components is in this post.

I have also collected the running list basic assumptions (axioms) on which this argument rests, as far as I can tell. This, too, will of course evolve.