Day 1: Innovation Thesis and Opportunity Discovery

Leadership Role in Innovation

• Distinguish innovation leadership from sponsoring events
• Identify decisions shaping innovation system behavior
• Balance protection with appropriate team challenge
• Assess one leader's innovation imprint

Discovering Worthwhile Problems

• Gather evidence from beneficiary experience
• Identify important unmet value gaps
• Separate the problem from preferred solutions
• Frame an opportunity with clear boundaries

Enterprise Innovation Thesis

• Choose arenas aligned with strategic direction
• Define acceptable forms of investment value
• Set principles governing risk and partnerships
• Formulate a guiding thesis for investments

Day 2: Portfolio Governance and Funding Decisions

Multiple Innovation Horizons

• Classify initiatives by distance from operations
• Balance improvement with exploratory growth bets
• Define suitable distribution of innovation resources
• Map the current enterprise portfolio

Stage-Based Investment Gates

• Link funding decisions to evidence
• Define conditions for progression between stages
• Protect experiments from premature scale requirements
• Design gates across three development stages

Innovation Decision Governance

• Allocate sponsorship assessment and investment authority
• Prevent functional interests from biasing selection
• Set review cadence matching learning velocity
• Simulate an initial funding committee

Day 3: Experimentation and Market Learning

Value and Adoption Hypotheses

• Define behavior proving an authentic need
• Frame falsifiable and measurable solution hypotheses
• Prioritize dangerous unknowns before development begins
• Set up hypothesis board for solutions

Lean Experiment Design

• Choose the simplest test producing evidence
• Define sample measure and acceptance threshold
• Avoid metrics that reward vanity
• Design an experiment under time constraints

Learning and Venture Decisions

• Analyze results without selecting convenient evidence
• Decide to continue adapt or stop
• Document lessons reusable across future initiatives
• Facilitate a structured experiment review

Day 4: Innovation Climate and Value Scaling

Environment for Measured Courage

• Define acceptable and unacceptable innovation failure
• Separate experiment assessment from creator status
• Reward early discovery of incorrect assumptions
• Investigate a policy blocking experimentation

Collaboration and Partnerships

• Identify capabilities requiring external partners
• Choose collaboration models protecting intended value
• Manage intellectual property from early stages
• Outline a partner map for solutions

Designing Scaling Pathways

• Test solution fit across broader contexts
• Estimate operating adoption and funding requirements
• Choose staged expansion or partnership routes
• Build indicators of readiness for scale

Day 5: Innovation Investment Decision Laboratory

Opportunity File Preparation

• Summarize problem beneficiary and potential value
• Present evidence and remaining critical assumptions
• Define bet size and acceptable loss
• Recommend the next investment stage

Experimentation and Scaling Plan

• Sequence tests that progressively increase confidence
• Specify resources and decisions for stages
• Include explicit ethical and operational safeguards
• Estimate progression and stopping gates

Innovation Board Simulation

• Present an opportunity before investment reviewers
• Answer questions about value and risk
• Adjust the bet using available evidence
• Issue a reasoned innovation funding decision

• Field discovery converting observations into testable opportunities
• Hypothesis and experiment labs producing rapid decision evidence
• Portfolio and gate tools governing staged investment decisions
• Innovation board simulation evaluating a participant-selected opportunity