Jurgen Appelo says that when we combine Design Thinking, Lean Start-up, and Agile Development; everyone misses the point of continuous innovation.

He says that there is a misunderstanding popping up when people offer diagrams explaining ‘how to combine’ Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Business Modeling, Growth Hacking, Lean UX, and Agile Development.

The result is a sequence of circles that looks like a waterfall process. And everyone misses the point of continuous innovation.

It is a meta-model for iterative processes built to promote continuous innovation. Based on Lean Start-up and Design Thinking, there are no separate sequential steps in a continuous innovation approach. Instead, there are seven streams of activities that all swirl together in a dynamic-looking model.

And if we combinethese two, the result would be something like this:

Sorry Jurgen for representing it with a colorful graph; but it is how I visualize these seven swirling streams in ONE circle.

The Innovation Vortex consists of seven different streams of work, swirling into each other:

1. Contextualize (Focus) is about narrowing down innovation to a domain. You need to focus on something and decide which part is worth exploring and improving.

• How to choose which domain to focus on?
• How to decide what is in-scope versus out-of-scope?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: Business Model Canvas

2. Empathize (Discover) is where the Design Thinking models start and shine. The result is usually unstructured research findings.

• How to understand people’s experiences?
• How to try to uncover their needs and feelings?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: Analytics, Ethnography (observation & interviews), and Empathy Maps

3. Synthesize (Define) your observations need to be processed and studied to get to the core problems that should be solved. The result of this stream should be a clear problem definition in human-centered language.

• How to work on a cohesive picture of needs and feelings?
• How to clarify people´s problems?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: Personas or Customer Archetypes and their Jobs to be Done

4. Hypothesize (Ideate) based on what you’ve learned, you can start working on ideas for solutions. Generating hypotheses can involve brainstorming techniques. What are the most radical or original ways to address your user’s frustrations? You want to get as many ideas as possible.

• How to come up with ideas to address problems?
• How to brainstorm about solutions?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: Lean Experiments & Value Proposition Canvas

5. Externalize (Build) your team will be creating the smallest posible thing that can be validated, and making it available to customers, by running Lean Experiments. That’s why you are creating an inexpensive, scaled down, and fast-to-make prototype, or, in Lean Startup terms, a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): to validate learning.

• How to build prototypes for possible solutions?
• How to prepare iterative releases for experiments?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: Minimum Viable Products (MVP)

6. Sensitize (Test) after you have offered one or more solutions to the user, you must gather data about their effectiveness and become sensitive to whatever the users are doing. At the end, you must select the most workable, feasible, and effective idea from the various prototypes

• How to check how people respond to your releases?
• How to validate the experiments?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: A/B Testing, Indicators/Metrics/KPI’s, Journey Mapping, Customer demos

7. Systematize (Learn) this stream is about deciding what to do with what you’ve learned. After closely observing people using prototypes, monitoring the working solution, gather feedback, etc.; you should have enough information to see how the results fit into the bigger picture. Did the solution work as intended? Are further improvements necessary?

• How to reflect what you have learned so far?
• How to evaluate how to improve your systems?

Tools or techniques for this exercise: Value stream Mapping, DevOps, and Agile Retrospectives

CONCLUSIONS:

Continuous discovery, delivery, and improvement is ONE circle

Take iterative processes. The idea of developing solutions to problems in an iterative manner has been around for ages.

Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile frameworks insist on iterative approaches to innovation, and neither suggests that their steps always need to be performed in a linear manner. It is true that they commonly follow each other but backtracking and hop-skip-jumping across the seven steps is fine. You can work in any step at any time.

Some people will focus more on empathizing with users/customers while others may be more interested on the validation of hypotheses. For real innovation, all steps are relevant.

“Continuous discovery, delivery, and improvement is one vortex representing the messy, non-linear, dynamic process that is innovation. The Innovation Vortex is neither complicated nor linear. It is complex, simple, and dynamic.”

Sources:

• https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3941917/enterprise-architects-combine-design-thinking-lean-start
• https://link.medium.com/cafGSWTNp2
• http://informationsystemsbiology.blogspot.com/2015/10/lean-startup-and-lean-software-factory.html
• https://shiftup.work/combining-design-thinking-lean-startup-and-agile-development-everyone-misses-the-point-of-continuous-innovation/