The Next Practice innovation process

The Next Practice innovation process is designed to:

Create a disciplined, managed space for developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches, shielding innovation teams from the organization’s dominant logic and established standard operating procedures, which can stifle new thinking and approaches.
Generate true ‘breakthrough’ innovations that satisfy extremely demanding performance targets, thereby fostering new business and service/ product ‘categories,’ not just incremental improvements. The process is used to develop new ‘playing fields’ on which the organization defines the rules.
De-risk the introduction of innovations into the market, protecting existing operations and brands, and establishing clear proof-of-concept before making investments to launch and scale.
Document the discovered ‘next practices,’ specify their application in detailed entry plans, and build team competencies and capability for their organizational diffusion.

Achieving the above objectives requires: a contracted process with clear stages, performance thresholds, and decision-making parameters (i.e., a conventional stage-gate process) COMBINED WITH an iterative, experimental learning process that supports wide-ranging exploration at each stage.

A simplified illustration of The Next Practice process is presented in the following figure. The process includes cycles of iterative experimentation as well as clear decision-making stages. The blue stages represent activities where the organization’s management is involved. The green stages represent activities where existing management assumptions, models, and procedures are ‘suspended,’ and designated innovation teams are typically managed under direct consultant supervisory guidance to do iterative learning and innovation work.

The Next Practice Innovation Process

For more information about applications of this approach to specific strategic domains, see the specific business, urban, and environment strategy sections on this website. Brugmann and his associates have also developed numerous domain-specific methods, exercises, and tools for each stage of the process to help teams analyze their problems differently, develop and statistically validate insights, establish new performance targets, co-create solutions and new products with others, and develop their new business and delivery models.

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