Innovation Resources

Startup Poker Rules

Try our game of Startup Poker, where you can practice matching your business model to your market.

Measuring Innovation Boards

When large organizations develop innovation programs, they typically adopt metered funding as a way to resource these new innovation proj...

Facilitation Guides - Building Teams

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through a human resource a...

Facilitation Guides - Complex Sales Calls

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the preparation, e...

Mindset Map Template

This template provides the space and structure to outline the mindset your team currently possesses so that you can identify what is desi...

Facilitation Guides - Leadership Habits

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of add...

Facilitation Guides - Complex Sales Mapping

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through creating a scalabl...

Facilitation Guides - Team Accountability

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through rituals and practi...

Kromatic Client Case Study – CBUSA

After our coaching program, the CBUSA team grew from ad hoc membership to a fully cross-functional team of 7, and their innovation planni...

Sales Call Note Taking Template

A detailed note taking template best used for video or voice sales calls.

The Hidden Investor in Corporate Growth Boards

Growth boards — also known as corporate innovation boards, investor boards, or innovation steering committees — are all the rage these da...

Reverse Press Release Template

Use this template to describe a north star for the team so they’ll always know which direction to go. Write a press release that you want...

How to Calculate Opportunity Cost of Innovation

When corporations start investing in innovation, they try to base decisions on evidence, and only give away enough resources when the evi...

Levels of Innovation Metrics

When people say they want to measure innovation or implement innovation accounting, they are often talking about a number of different th...

Sprint Retrospective Template

Here’s a simple template that you can use to run sprint retrospectives. This template asks an individual or a team to reflect on three th...

Sprint Review Template

Sprint reviews take place at the end of the sprint. Between a sprint planning meeting and daily standups, you should be able to get throu...

Daily Standup Template

Daily standups are short meetings that offer team members a chance to give updates on their sprint goals. They serve as a valuable tool f...

Facilitation Guides - Coaching Mindset & Facilitation Techniques

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare themselves for coaching sessions with teams, both from a ...

Backlog Grooming Template

The Backlog Grooming Template is all about making sure we have a healthy “bucket” of work to pull from when we are planning our sprints. ...

Sprint Planning Template

A sprint is a time-boxed iteration within which a team does its work. A sprint can last one week, two weeks, or even just a few days. Thi...

Levels of Innovation Metrics (poster)

When starting an innovation program, be clear about what you’re trying to measure. If you measure the wrong thing, it will only obscure t...

Innovators Handbook 2021

We’ve always been big fans of the Innov8rs conference, and giant fans of unconferences. It’s the best way to get past the buzzwords and h...

Facilitation Guides - Creating Effective Exercises

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons, including generating exercises to effectiv...

Innovation, Climate Change, and the Economy

Like many Americans stuck in the turmoil of our political season, a global pandemic, and murder hornets (still a thing), I’ve got a lot o...

Facilitation Guides - Innovation and Portfolio Management

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through allocating resourc...

Learning Journey Mad Lib Template

Coaches use this template when helping someone unlearn something, which is often the first step to teaching them something.

Exercise Facilitator Guide

Use this template to plan and execute an effective learning exercise.

Completing a 2×2 Risk Prioritization Matrix

Risk mapping is one of the most important activities an entrepreneur should conduct when laying out a potential business model. A 2×2 mat...

Facilitation Guides - Project Management & Roadmapping

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons so they can guide others in designing a pro...

Facilitation Guides - Innovation Ecosystem Design & Metrics

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through measuring and repa...

Customer Validation under Lockdown

The COVID-19 crisis has been a bust for customer discovery. Gone are the days of visiting crowded cafés, bars, and co-working spaces to c...

2x2 Risk Mapping Template

This is a simple template that will help your team notestorm questions and prioritize which of those questions to experiment on first.

Innovation Project Evaluation Worksheet

Use this template to consistently apply decision criteria when allocating budget to an innovation project.

Innovation Process Checklist

Use and modify this checklist as a benchmark against which to measure innovation investment and management decisions.

Stage Gate Process Criteria Template

This is a basic innovation funnel template for designing your stage gates process based on objective, resources and unknowns.

Basic Portfolio Allocation Template - Google Sheets

A basic template to help you plan and allocate budget for your innovation portfolio.

Basic Innovation Funnel Template - Google Sheets

A simple template that you can use to design and model innovation funnels.

Value Proposition Statement Mad Lib Template - Google Slides

A simple template that you can use to explain your value proposition.

Facilitation Guides - Innovation Ecosystem Triage

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for teaching the definition of an innovation ecosystem as well as symptoms that indicate ...

Innovation Tactics & Events

This is a short list of innovation enabling methods designed to counteract innovation blockers in your ecosystem.

Innovation Obstacle Map

A template on how to identify and map out obstacles to innovation that are holding your ecosystem back.

Our New Lean Template (and Why You Shouldn't Use It)

Every company is different and requires a unique business model. Our Lean Experiment template can give you something solid to build yours...

Facilitation Guides - Financial (and Mission Impact) Modeling

This slide deck contains instructions and notes to prepare first a visual and then a quantified financial model for an early stage idea.

Skill-Mapping Guide

This guide instructs you how to identify and map your and your team's existing skills to better understand the resources (and skill gaps)...

Financial Modeling Monte Carlo Analysis Example (xlsx)

This template is an extension of the basic financial modeling template which incorporates a Monte Carlo analysis to improve predictions. ...

Financial Modeling Monte Carlo Analysis Example (Google Sheet)

This template is an extension of the basic financial modeling template which incorporates a Monte Carlo analysis to improve predictions. ...

Facilitation Guides - Value Proposition Tests

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for coaches to prepare for and guide others through testing value propositions.

Why Are You Starting Your Innovation Program from Scratch?

More and more companies are jumping on the innovation bandwagon and starting their own innovation program. It could be in the form of an ...

Facilitation Guides - Survey Design

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for effective survey design in an innovative environment. It covers the dos and don'ts of...

Innovation Portfolio Management – Principles Before Tools

Martin Kupp is an associate professor for entrepreneurship at ESCP Europe in Paris and a visiting professor at the ESMT European School o...

Innovation Metrics – What Should Innovation Programs Measure?

“What are the one or two innovation metrics that you need to keep a corporate innovation program alive? Most corporations are made up of ...

Paper Prototyping: How TenTune Harnessed the Power of the Pencil

When Vladimir Horbovanu met Yiyo Guerra in 2012 at Hackers and Founders in Monterey, Mexico, he found a kindred spirit. Guerra, a music p...

Learning Culture Part II: How to Get the Best Out of Everyone

In a previous post, UnLearning to Lead/learning culture I wrote about the benefits of intent-based leadership — the idea that managers sh...

Innovation Ecosystem Design Using Liebig’s Law of the Minimum

When governments, corporations, and entrepreneurs start building innovation ecosystems, there’s a flurry of predictable activity.

Rules of Thumb for Quantitative Experiments

A lot of innovation work involves small sample sizes and relies on qualitative data. Design thinking, agile, customer discovery, and lean...

Applying Innovation Metrics and Objectives by Department

Innovation Management isn’t just the fun stuff like coaching teams and setting up investor boards. It requires developing an entire innov...

Fear the Zebra

This is where we coined the term Z.E.B.R.A., which stands for Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant. The Zebra is a far more disreputable ani...

Version History

Contributors

How to Use This Book

Who Is This Book For?

Experiment Calculator

Get clear results from quantitative experiments using this Sample size and Margin of Error Calculator. Compare results vs. a benchmark o...

Basic Financial Modeling Template (Google Sheet)

This spreadsheet template helps you create a practical financial model with a small number of key hypotheses. This template represents yo...

Index of Methods

Index of Questions

Scorecards

A scorecard is an evaluative decision-making or prioritizing shortcut, often done in a spreadsheet.

Off-Brand Testing

Off-brand testing is a technique that helps established companies run experiments while minimizing risk to their brand equity.

A/B Testing

A/B testing (also known as split testing and bucket testing) is a randomized method of comparing two versions of an element (A and B) aga...

Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz (WOZ) test involves one or more individuals simulating fully functioning product features without the use of technology.

Usability Testing

Usability testing involves observing people trying to complete a series of tasks while using an interactive product.

Product/Market Fit Survey

The Product/Market Fit Survey (PMF) specifically asks the customer, “How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?” with a ...

Paper Prototyping

Quickly test a solution idea by simulating user-product interactions using paper drawings and cutouts.

Net Promoter Score Survey

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) identifies customer loyalty to the brand or product.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a simple view of product metrics that displays information about the general health and viability of the product.

Solution Interview

The solution interview builds on our research around the problem and proposes a solution to see how potential customers react.

Picnic in the Graveyard

This technique involves exploring "near miss" failures similar to our product idea to generate ideas about what to test and how to build ...

Dogfooding

Dogfooding is simply using the product as if we were the customer and experiencing it firsthand.

Demo Pitch

A demo pitch is when we present or pitch our solution using some kind of product or service demonstration in the hope of convincing a pot...

Concierge Test

Concierge is a technique to test the solution of a customer problem by manually performing tasks as a service.

Competitor Usability Testing

Competitor usability testing is observing our target market using a competitor’s products or services to gain insights on the mindset of ...

Competitor Analysis

Competitive analysis is very much a secondary research method that we can perform online relatively quickly and comprehensively.

Ask an Expert

Founders ask experts for opinions, then choose whether or not to act on those opinions.

Analog/Digital

This technique helps decouple the risks around physical delivery of a product from a digital component of the product.

Value Proposition Test - Video

The video smoke test consists of using a trailer video to test excitement and virality/buzz when describing the product to an early-adopt...

Value Proposition Test - Sales Pitch

Conducting a sales pitch as a smoke test is when an entrepreneur pitches a value proposition to a potential user or customer for the purp...

Value Proposition Test - Pre-Sales

Pre-sales involves accepting payment in exchange for a promise to deliver the value proposition at a later date.

Value Proposition Test - Pocket

This smoke test applies to physical goods or products with hardware components — at minimum a mobile phone.

Value Proposition Test - Landing Page

A landing page used as a minimum viable product evaluates whether a particular type of customer wants a proposed product based on actual ...

Value Proposition Test - High Bar

A high bar test helps to gauge the customer’s willingness to pay without using any form of monetary payment.

Value Proposition Test - Flyer

Flyers serve as placeholders for conversations that need to happen.

Value Proposition Test - Fake Door

People are bad at predicting what they want, but they are great at reacting to new offers. Building just the entry to an offer makes it p...

Value Proposition Test - Event

We can use an event to smoke test a problem, and to some extent, content that is attractive for our target audience.

Value Proposition Test - Broken Promise

This smoke test helps test how much of a natural/inherent virality lies in the idea itself. It helps identify high-potential ideas before...

Secondary Market Research

Secondary market research gathers and interprets available information about the target market, and includes published reports, newspaper...

Comprehension Test

A comprehension test will evaluate whether or not the customer understands the marketing message explaining the value proposition.

Closed-Ended Survey

Converge on what's relevant in great detail, particularly to customers or prospects.

Open-Ended Survey

Fixed set of questions, usually via a mass-communication channel such as an email or website pop-up.

Focus Groups

A small group discussion designed to rapidly gain customer feedback on a given topic.

Experience Sampling

Get information about a participant's daily behaviors, thoughts, and feelings in real-time, or as close to it as possible.

Data Mining

Data mining uses statistics from large amounts of data to learn about target markets and customer behaviors.

Customer Discovery Interviews

Gain insight into customers' perspective, pain points, purchasing habits, and so forth.

Contextual Inquiry

Combination of semi-structured interviews and observations done in the actual location where the problem occurs or the solution will be u...

Tags and Other Frameworks

Hypothesis Checklist

A sure way to keep our sanity is to start with a strong hypothesis to give the experiment structure.

Generative vs. Evaluative

Do we have a clear hypothesis to evaluate or do we need to generate a clear idea?

Problem vs. Solution

Do we need to learn about the problem (ie, market) or the solution (ie, product)?

What Are You Trying to Learn?

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” — Albert E...

Value Proposition Statement Mad Lib Template

A simple template that you can use to explain your value proposition.

Facilitation Guides - Practical Statistics

This slide deck contains instructions and notes for coaches to prepare for and guide others through statistical principles commonly appli...

Practical Statistics - Rules of Thumb

Apply these practical rules of thumb when running experiments to avoid common biases in the data you use to make business decisions.

The Complete Team

In Silicon Valley, the common sense wisdom used to be that engineers were the most critical team members. The good ones were rare and har...

In Defense of the Hi.P.P.O

Hi.P.P.O stands for the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. It’s a time honored way of making decisions which goes back centuries.

One Lean Startup Experiment Per Week

“Go fast” is one of the principles of running a lean startup experiment. The faster we go around the Build-Measure-Learn loop, the faster...

Entrepreneurship Degree: Ask the Right Questions

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”

The ROI of Innovation – What Is it?

As product managers, we are often asked a single question when we propose a new product: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI)? What’s th...

Value Creation – In a World with No Technology Or Data…

My good friend and longtime Lean Startup Circle organizer and volunteer Spike Morelli (who has great office hours) gave me a wonderful bo...

Importance = Business Impact * Uncertainty

It may seem silly, but how we define “important” defines how we spend our days. Teams can get stuck in endless meetings where we debate w...

Ten Monster Projects That Will Kill Your Career As an Intrapreneur

We can be entrepreneurial and still get a paycheck…or that’s what they claim. “I’m an intrapreneur!” is the new rallying cry inside corpo...

Corporate Innovation Labs: A Case Study on DHL’s Startup Lab

Corporate innovation labs engage founders and participants across professional boundaries to bring startup innovation techniques into a c...

What Is an Innovation Ecosystem?

I don’t remember when I first heard the term innovation ecosystem, but I do remember how it had an immediate appeal. It sounded importan...

Facilitation Guides - Innovation Culture & Group Behavior

This facilitation guide will help you coach someone to systematically create a culture of innovation that can scale to an entire organiza...

Facilitation Guides - Experiment Types: The Real Startup Book

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches foster an understanding of the many common types of lean experime...

Facilitation Guides - Storyboarding & Metrics

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of int...

Facilitation Guides - Advanced Experiment & Research Design

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through experiment design ...

Complex Sales Calls

The customer discovery skills you’ve learned so far won’t close a sale. At some point, active listening and discovery of a customer’s pro...

Customer Relationships

Early adopter customers are hard to find, but crucial to the success of an entrepreneur's product. A simple follow-up can build relations...

Marketing Channel Development

How does a company acquire effective sales channels and use them to scale sales & marketing? In this module we will discuss the differ...

Stakeholder Management

How can an innovation project avoid typical political hurdles of large companies? ifferent cultures, industry domains, and companies ...

Team Accountability

Knowing the work that needs to be done on an innovation project is one thing. Knowing how to actually get it done is another. This module...

Creating Effective Exercises

Using a topic of your choosing, you will construct exercises to demonstrate effective teaching towards an objective and key result. Parti...

Building Teams

How can an innovation project succeed when teams are working half time on the project? In short, they can’t (or it’s at least very ver...

Effective Survey Design

Surveys are some of the best and worst tools for an innovator. They are great when you can collect valuable quantitative data (such as ma...

Innovation Ecosystem Design & Metrics

All ecosystems are different, and blindly copying another company’s model can lead to disaster. Each company must take its strengths and ...

Leadership Habits

Become a better leader by identifying habits that work and don’t work in startup environments. This module helps you identify your own ba...

Innovation Strategy

Define a vision for the future, a path to get there, and effective watchtowers to see when disruption is coming. This module puts your co...

Business Model Design

This module shows you how startups use business models to drive innovation, including how uses of a business model differ between startup...

Coaching Mindset & Facilitation Techniques

This module goes into the softer side of coaching, with a focus on familiarizing you with facilitation techniques, understanding differen...

Practical Statistics for Quantitative Experiments

Support your customer discovery, landing page, and comprehension test processes with a basic grasp of applicable statistics. You will lea...

Facilitation Guides - Customer Discovery and Debriefing

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the end-to-end pro...

Pitching Innovation Projects

At some point, you're going to need resources and you're going to need to pitch to investors. Whether you're pitching a VC or an internal...

Usability Testing

Even if your product has all the right features, customers can't love what they can't use. You may have the curse of knowledge. What is o...

Facilitation Guides - Customer Segmentation for Complex Sales (B2B)

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of ide...

Facilitation Guides - Business Model Risk Prioritization

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of ide...

Sales CRM Template (Google Sheet)

This is a simple, generic spreadsheet CRM that can (and should) be customized by early stage startups who are just establishing a sales p...

Complex Sales Buyer Type Matrix Template (Google Sheets)

Use the Complex Sales Buyer Type Matrix to deconstruct the roles and needs of each player in a complex sales process with your target cus...

Experiment & Research Design

Entrepreneurs are strongly biased towards action to overcome analysis paralysis. But such haste often leads to poorly designed experiment...

Complex (B2B) Sales Mapping

Complex sales with multiple stakeholders is far more complicated than simple sales for a consumer application. Long sales cycles and comp...

Facilitation Guides - Setting Personal & Team Goals

This facilitation guide contains instructions and notes to help coaches prepare their lessons and guide others through the process of set...

Sales Guide Template (.docx)

A comprehensive sales guide including email templates, checklists and exercises to prepare you and your team for a successful repeatable ...

Sales Guide Template (google doc)

A comprehensive sales guide including email templates, checklists and exercises to prepare you and your team for a successful repeatable ...

Customer Segmentation for Complex Sales (B2B)

Larger organizations require more stakeholders to close a sale. Understanding the differences between Economic Buyers, Technical Buyers, ...

Setting Personal & Team Goals

Goal-setting is an important step before any major journey. Defining effective goals allows you and your team to make progress and then m...

The Real Startup Book (Amazon Kindle)

A large, crowdsourced compilation of inquiry methods (i.e. experiment and research techniques) from lean practitioners worldwide. Every m...

Monster Project Cards

A fun deck of cards to help explain why some projects seems easy and some seem outright impossible. Useful for running group discussions.

Plinkromatic

A simple game that explains the principles of innovation funding. As the VP of innovation you allocate your budget and make go no go deci...

Innovation Board Judging Template

A very basic template for judging Intrapreneur startup pitches. It is meant for early stage projects and judges without extensive innovat...

IDEA Template

A basic template for creating simple pitches for those new to innovation and ideation. Only contains three elements to focus the concept ...

Customer Persona Framework

A persona template to break your real and potential customer base into smaller, more useful groups. These groups are defined by various b...

Financial (and Mission Impact) Modeling

Every entrepreneur needs to understand how to create a basic financial model of their business. This module teaches you the most importan...

Experiment Types: The Real Startup Book

After identifying a clear business question, we need to identify the right method to gather data that will answer that question. This mod...

Jobs to Be Done Template

Use the Jobs to Be Done framework to empathize with your target customers. This is a simple template to help define a job to be done by y...

Innovation and Portfolio Management

Why don't stage gates work? Why doesn't spending more money on R&D lead to more innovation? How can I drag my company into the future? ...

Kromatic Innovation Ecosystem Booklet

The pace of innovation is constantly accelerating, threatening to disrupt every industry that doesn’t disrupt itself first. Maintaining a...

Innovation Ecosystem Map

A template on how to map out your ecosystem and identify obstacles to innovation that are holding your ecosystem back.

Learn S.I.M.P.L.E. Template

This template guides you through the four basic steps of a designing an experiment so you can generate the most useful information to mak...

Value Proposition Comprehension Testing - How To Guide

When conversion rates on a landing page or sales page are low, sometimes it just means the page isn't well written. To improve conversion...

Value Proposition & Comprehension Testing

Creating a compelling product or service for the customer starts with a compelling value proposition. If a customer can't understand what...

Storyboarding & Metrics

Qualitative data and quantitative data do not exist in opposition. Qualitative data from UXers should not compete with the quantitative d...

Project Management & Roadmapping

Managing a series of experiments aimed at discovering a business model is different from managing the execution of a known strategy. The ...

Innovation Ecosystem Triage

Innovation Ecosystems are complex, and they challenge some of the traditional models of R&D and innovation. A holistic view of how cultur...

Customer Segmentation for Simple Sales (B2C)

Demographics used to be a marketer’s only tool, but it's insufficient for early-stage customer discovery, and almost useless for designin...

Business Model Risk Prioritization

All innovation projects come with risks, and successful businesses know how to navigate them. This module covers how to brainstorm and pr...

Innovation Culture & Group Behavior

How can startup culture be maintained when growing the company? How can existing companies bring startup culture into their teams? Mainta...

Risk Evaluation Template

A template to analyze risks (including moral hazard) to experiments and brainstorm ways to mitigate them.

Customer Discovery Note Taking Template

A note taking template for live customer discovery interviews. Best printed out and used with a pen for in person interviews.

Customer Discovery Note Taking Template (Google Doc)

A simple template for taking notes for a customer discovery call in a collaborative Google Doc. Best used for over the phone or video cal...

Lean, Agile, & UX Principles

Lean Startup was born from a need for companies to innovate in high-risk environments in constantly changing markets. Like its predecesso...

Customer Discovery & Debriefing

There is nothing more impactful to your early-stage business model than truly understanding the person you are building for and selling t...

Learn S.M.A.R.T. Template

A detailed experiment template to help you design and document S.M.A.R.T. experiments and research. (S.M.A.R.T. = Smart, Measurable, Achi...

Value Proposition Comprehension Test

When conversion rates on your landing page or sales page are low, sometimes it just means the page isn't well written. To improve convers...

Customer Conversation Insights Template (Google Sheet)

This template will help you organize your customer discovery interview notes into actionable insights.

The Real Startup Book

The Real Startup Book is a large, crowdsourced compilation of research and experiment inquiry methods from lean practitioners worldwide. ...

Business Model Canvas for UX

This is a modified template based on the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder. This will help you break down the user experienc...

Opportunity Insight Tool

Quick and dirty reference chart to prioritize your sales leads.

Product/Market Fit Storyboard

A template for designing early-stage user experience to achieve Product / Market fit. Based on the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Ost...