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Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices, 2024

8 July 2024 - ID G00813479 - 125 min read

By Peter Skyttegaard, Tsuneo Fujiwara, and 2 more

Innovation is key to pursuing growth opportunities while navigating volatility and uncertainty.
Digital leaders should study this Hype Cycle to understand the trends in practices that can
help lead, organize and execute their innovation programs to deliver maximum impact across
the organization.

Analysis
What You Need to Know
Innovation is a discipline that enables organizations to generate and execute an ongoing stream
of new ideas that create value. Because every organization has unique goals, the exact design and
delivery of the innovation programs and initiatives to achieve those goals will differ. Leaders who
design and implement innovation programs that continuously adapt to best serve business and
innovation goals will be well-prepared to develop new solutions to new opportunities and
challenges.

Executive leaders can use this Hype Cycle to identify the innovation practices most likely to deliver
success in all stages of the innovation process.

The Hype Cycle

Innovation management is a relatively mature discipline with a wide range of well-established
techniques, as illustrated by the spread of practices across the full Hype Cycle. Even some
practices at the trigger or peak stages of the curve, such as business model innovation
frameworks and innovation ecosystems, are not new techniques but rather underused approaches
that can help organizations that haven’t yet taken advantage of them.

Many of the practices included in this Hype Cycle generate recurring interest from clients to
Gartner’s expert inquiry service. We have also included some that are just emerging, but offer the
potential for significant improvements to the innovation process, such as the minimum viable
innovation system.

The practices cover leading and organizing innovation initiatives and key stages of executing the
innovation process:

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Leading and organizing for innovation: Chief innovation officer, company builder, innovation
centers of excellence, innovation ecosystems, (virtual) innovation labs, open innovation,
(adaptive) innovation governance, democratized innovation, MVIS: minimum viable innovation
system

Improving the innovation process and culture: AI-driven innovation, effectuation, innovation
culture hacks, inclusive innovation

Insights and idea generating: Insight collection, combinatorial innovation, data-driven

innovation, emerging technology radars, continuous foresight, trendspotting, tapestry, business
model frameworks, speculative design, moonshot thinking, idea management tools,
hackathons, lead user method, LEGO Serious Play

Evaluating and experimenting: Lean startup, design thinking, design sprints, pretotyping, visual
collaboration applications

See Organizing for Innovation: Maturing From Accidental to Intentional Innovation and Executing
on Innovation: Design the Process From Idea to Value for additional information on innovation
techniques.

Figure 1: Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices, 2024

The Priority Matrix

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Although many of the innovation practices in this Hype Cycle are well-established, they are not
necessarily considered to be “business as usual.” In many organizations, even techniques that
have been around for decades, such as hackathons and innovation workshops, are only used
intermittently — often driven by a single enthusiastic executive or manager. By clearly
demonstrating the value of innovation techniques, executive leaders can embed them better into
broader management practices and tools.

Most of the practices have a lag time (in terms of years to mainstream adoption) of less than five
years to reflect their full potential. Some, including AI-driven innovation, have longer time frames
as they are earlier in their maturity and adoption.

On the benefit axis, most of the practices are designated as moderate or high impact, although
their actual effectiveness is highly dependent on how they are implemented and whether they
become part of a sustainable organizational competency. AI-driven innovation is potentially
transformational in its ability to drive high-impact innovation at scale through the discovery of new
ideas and rapid progress through the innovation pipeline. Business model innovation frameworks
and moonshot thinking are transformational in their approaches to opportunity identification.

Table 1: Priority Matrix for Innovation Practices, 2024

Benefit Years to Mainstream Adoption

More
Less Than 2
2 - 5 Years 5 - 10 Years Than 10
Years
Years

Transformational Business Model Combinato AI-Driven

Innovation rial Innovatio
Framework Disruption n

Moonshot
Thinking
Tapestry

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Benefit Years to Mainstream Adoption

More
Less Than 2
2 - 5 Years 5 - 10 Years Than 10
Years
Years

High Data-Driven Chief Innovation Company

Innovation Officer Builder
Design Continuous
Thinking Foresight
Innovation Democratized
Centers of Innovation
Excellence
Innovation
Innovation Ecosystems
Labs
Insight
Open Collection
Innovation
Lead User
Visual Method
Collaboration
Lean Startup
Applications
Pretotyping
Trendspotting

Venture Client
Model

Moderate (Adaptive) Idea Effectuatio

Innovation Management n
Governance Tools
LEGO
Design Sprints Inclusive Serious
Innovation Play
Emerging
Technology MVIS: Minimum Speculativ
Radars Viable e Design
Innovation
Hackathons
System
Innovation
OKR for
Culture Hacks
Innovation
Virtual
Innovation Labs

Low

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Benefit Years to Mainstream Adoption

More
Less Than 2
2 - 5 Years 5 - 10 Years Than 10
Years
Years

Source: Gartner (July 2024)

Off the Hype Cycle

The following innovation practices were on the previous version of this Hype Cycle but have been
removed this year:

Corporate incubators: Removed since we are not experiencing recurring interest from clients in
this.

Idea challenges: Removed as it is now deemed fully mature.

Innovation intellectual property management: Removed since we are not experiencing recurring
interest from clients in this.

Innovation training: Removed as it is now deemed fully mature.

Innovation workshops: Removed as it is now deemed fully mature.

Microinnovations: Removed since we are not seeing this term being used.

Scenario planning: Although scenario planning may still be used in innovation, we see it being
used in a number of other areas including futurism, strategy formulation and product visioning.
As a result, we no longer wish to position this as an innovation practice.

On the Rise
MVIS: Minimum Viable Innovation System
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Embryonic

Definition:

The Minimum Viable Innovation System (MVIS) is a framework designed to create and manage a
lean innovation process within organizations, focusing on the most essential elements needed to
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bring new ideas to fruition quickly and efficiently. MVIS uses venture capital standard procedures
to deliver projects and constantly search for minimum resistance to development.
Why This Is Important

MVIS was introduced in the Harvard Business Review ( Build an Innovation Engine in 90 Days)
and resonated with innovation service providers. MVIS allows organizations to systematically test
and refine ideas with minimal resources, reducing risks and costs. This approach fosters
competitive agility and responsiveness in dynamic markets. The model optimizes innovation
processes within organizations by focusing on the most essential elements needed for the rapid
development and testing of new ideas.

Business Impact

The MVIS approach maximizes the use of limited resources, enabling organizations to iterate
faster and reduce the time to concept, focusing innovators on execution. MVIS also supports
scalability, allowing the innovation framework to expand or adapt as the organization grows. It
enhances the company’s adaptability to market changes and opportunities, ensuring that
innovations are both timely and relevant. Organizations can significantly improve their efficiency in
turning new ideas to projects.

Drivers

Need for agility: Fast-paced market environments require rapid responses to emerging trends
and disruptions.

Resource constraints: Many organizations face limitations in funding, staffing or other

resources.

Technological advancements: New tech enables quicker, more efficient development and
testing cycles.

Cultural shift to experimentation: There is growing acceptance and encouragement of a fail-

fast, learn-fast mentality in business.

Pressure to innovate: Industry changing dynamics and innovative competitors drive the need
for efficient systems to generate viable new products and services.

Obstacles

Ad hoc availability: Important resources, including senior management, are called into the
project without long preparation times.

Cultural resistance: Some organizational cultures may resist the streamlined, risk-tolerant
approaches MVIS requires.

Lack of commitment: Senior leadership needs to understand and endorse the raw MVIS
method to prevent it from faltering fast.

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Balancing core and new ventures: Allocating resources between maintaining core business
operations and pursuing innovations can be challenging.

Measuring impact: Establishing effective metrics to assess the success and ROI of MVIS
initiatives can be complex.
User Recommendations

Secure executive sponsorship: Gain and maintain ad hoc support from top management to
ensure the viability and resource allocation for MVIS.

Overcome culture: Evangelize the MVIS to reduce cultural resistance within the organization.

Dynamic funding: Use venture capital (VC) tactics to support MVIS mindset, such as key risk
mitigations as stage gates or setting funding thresholds to speed up the process.

Define clear metrics: Establish what success looks like in the early stages and how it will be
measured.

Create a supportive environment: Encourage a mindset of experimentation and acceptance of

failure as part of the innovation process.

Tailor the system to organizational needs: Adapt the MVIS framework to fit the organization’s
specific context and capabilities.
Inclusive Innovation
Analysis By: Mordecai ., Tsuneo Fujiwara

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

Inclusive innovation is the deliberate practice of creating spaces, engagements and results that
foster inclusion across innovation’s practice. By employing front-door tactics for inclusion through
innovation work, and the technologies adopted via the innovation practice, productivity and
change readiness increase, and an inclusive environment (i.e., culture change) becomes active in
organizations, countering issues of dormant potential, marginalization and one-solution
innovation.

Why This Is Important

Inclusive innovation is a practice that offers new thinking, where new strategies of working such
as the SCOPE framework and 4D approach, are easily adopted along with it (see Align Inclusion
and Innovation to Decrease Marginalization and Drive Productivity). By addressing
marginalization that can occur in traditional approaches to brainstorming, development and
delivery, inclusive innovation actualizes tactics that offer multiple ways to participate, engage and
collaborate.
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Business Impact

Aligning innovation work to broader inclusive innovation principles is the first step in creating an
antifragile organization. Teaming inclusion tactics into the practice of innovation has benefits for
employees, leaders, partners and the technology being engaged. Creating an environment
proactive in inclusion efforts can deliver greater productivity and change readiness, along with
better employee retention, diversified perspectives, and better work products.

Drivers

Inclusive innovation establishes itself off the call for cultural change made to leaders, by
employees, and demanded of the technologies engaged via:

“Open-source” methodology — An open collaboration model, fostering peer-to-peer analysis by

offering blueprints and early product testing to the public.

Procedural accountability — Transparent engagement to how decisions are made, ideas

validated and setting clear KPIs across innovation. By employees knowing how a process may
work initially, it can be adapted to best fit the way they participate.

Diverse perspectives — The need for multiple POVs and experiences to truly communicate an
idea’s validity.

Learning and development — Educational resources provided to employees at employer’s cost.

Innovation and HR (diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI]) are hubs of learning and development
to foster new skills and understandings, specifically via innovation activities that introduce and
broaden styles of collaboration, engagement and ideation processes.

DEI mandates — Corporate governance dictating an organizationwide commitment to DEI.

Further, government regulations create incentives for DEI initiatives and cultural accountability
making DEI work a high priority.

Inclusion toolkits — Inclusion tools are available, with training often required, for leaders and
employees. Inclusion tools may focus on areas such as not making assumptions,
understanding unconscious bias and self-reflecting on one’s own privilege. Though these
trainings provide practical application tools, implementation is low.

Obstacles

Traditional product roadmaps and innovation workshops can become rigid, ineffective
processes, with little flexibility. Engaging outdated frameworks can lead to likeability bias in
practice, lending themselves to systemic issues adversely targeting marginalized employees.

Siloed innovation work hinders the power of collective ideation and creates an echo chamber
for ideas. Siloes often bring team dynamics into innovation work, which can silence team
members or create a room catering to only management ideas.

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Innovation in some organizations is only explored via volunteer teams comprising people with
extra time in their schedules. “Extra time” is a privilege for employees that often leaves those
unable to spend extra hours at work, or with roles that require constant presence at their
workspace, out of opportunities.

Fear of being wrong can lead people to wanting spaces that “feel” right, activating affinity bias.
Inclusion requires self-reflection and vocalized accountability, which may feel uncomfortable.
User Recommendations

Enact “open source” idea generation earlier in innovation’s process to welcome a range of ideas,
strategies and solutions.

Foster fresh thinking and more inclusive experiences by training innovation teams on multiple
methods for innovation activities, including:

Ways of learning and participating

Different life experiences and abilities

Multiple ways to brainstorm, sprint, etc.

Focus on employee diversity. For any innovation opportunity, assemble new collections of
innovation squads, particularly in early ideation. Employees from multiple business units and
backgrounds can then repurpose inclusion tools with their own teams.

Demonstrate effective inclusionary hiring tools when exploring and vetting innovation
ecosystem partners. Avoid exclusionary practices, such as AI tools that may expedite vetting
but instill bias and affinity partnering (e.g., working with friends of friends).

Host inclusion training for team leads focused on acknowledging biases, and using easily
enacted tools to counter them.

Sample Vendors

Hustle Crew; MIT D-Lab; Penn Center for Inclusive Innovation & Technology

Gartner Recommended Reading

Align Inclusion and Innovation to Decrease Marginalization and Drive Productivity

Address Talent Shortages and Improve Retention With Autistic Talent

Speculative Design
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Brian Prentice

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging
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Definition:

Speculative design (SD) is an ideation approach that uses the concept of design to explore
possible future scenarios, provoke discussions and challenge conventional wisdom. It encourages
critical thinking and the examination of potential implications and ethical considerations of new
technologies, policies or social trends. Speculative design projects are conceptual in nature and
serve as conversation starters to inspire reflection on the future we want to create.

Why This Is Important

Speculative design enables the type of critical thinking necessary for radical innovation. It
anticipates trend impacts by creating nonlinear future artifacts and resists extrapolating the
present in scenarios. SD provokes debates, challenges assumptions, raises questions and
explores ethics, which lead to a better understanding of the social impact of technology and
responsible decision making. Seasoned designers build on familiar techniques, such as scenario
planning and backcasting.

Business Impact

In times of disruption and large-scale transformation, linearity is broken. To regain initiative and
determine the innovation response of an enterprise, speculative design provides a structured
approach to better align with future customers’ needs and ethical demands. By extracting
possible, plausible and desirable artifacts from the future, SD provides enterprises with the
opportunity to create radical new products, services and processes, while building a reputation for
responsible decision making.

Drivers

Complex societal changes: Challenges such as climate change, inequality, resource scarcity
and geopolitical upheaval are shifting market preferences, which are contained by citizen and
stakeholder needs. SD allows organizations to envision alternative futures and respond to
them.

Inherent storytelling: Large scale change demands advocates with a strong mission. SD is
based on powerful narratives of consumption and countering the usual narratives of
production.

Democratized access to innovation: Materializing scenarios in para-functional or postoptimal

prototypes are provoking the audience, allowing and strengthening the plurality of opinions, and
providing an actionable way to unlock swarm intelligence.

Obstacles

Resistance to unconventional thinking: Provoking methods often get stuck in the daily
operation as performance management systems favor immediate over sustainable problem
solving. Not every board and stakeholder embraces SD’s unconventional approach.

Operational focus: Without optionality-based finance mechanisms and the ability to quarantine
new ventures from established business operations, SD is unlikely to move beyond an ideation
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methodology.
Misunderstanding the approach: Stakeholders may misinterpret SD as impractical or frivolous
rather than recognizing its value in critical thinking and innovation.

Balancing speculation and practicality: SD is a cognitively intensive process that requires

substantial data to produce reasonably likely outcome-driven scenarios. Cutting corners in
practitioner skill sets, time spent in analysis or information sources can lead to unrealistic
scenarios prone to individual bias.
User Recommendations

Develop comprehensive and creative future scenarios by assembling a multidisciplinary fusion

team and partnering with an external agency or university to facilitate the process.

Redefine the measurements from point to collective outcomes.

Prime SD activities by having executive leadership define the key challenges, trends and areas
of concern for the organization.

Focus on user insights by combining desk research, expert interviews and market analysis to
prepare for the SD process.

Develop speculative concepts that address the challenges or opportunities. Create a visual
representation of prototypes to facilitate discussion and evaluation.

Embed SD in the enterprise decision-making, not just for innovation outcomes but for the agility
of democratized decision input.
Insight Collection
Analysis By: Mordecai ., Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

Insight collection is an Innovation Trigger technique, where a call for insight begins the innovation
journey. It collects thought starters from emerging technologies to solution requests that help
focus and tailor the idea generation process to follow. Through insight collection, innovation
leaders are able to start the innovation journey in greater collaboration and with more focus on the
opportunities they may explore or solve toward.

Why This Is Important

Insight collection serves as the Innovation Trigger in a collaborative way by calling for solutions,
trends and customer feedback. Innovation that begins at idea collection is overweighted with self-
interest, attaches to ego, and is too singularly focused to truly thrive in an enterprisewide
innovation process. Through culling a diverse range of insights, the insight collection process is
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responsive to the organization’s needs and interests, thereby broadening scope, engagement and
opportunity.
Business Impact

Insight collection fosters a culture of innovation that is collaborative and open, where the overall
pipeline becomes more focused and prioritized, as it starts from a solution, new opportunity, or
market POV and not a singular winning-idea focus. This diversifies the outcomes and fosters a
culture of innovation by starting with a foundation that is inclusive to multiple voices and open to
a range of opportunities. When innovation is inclusive, work product and change readiness almost
double (see Align Inclusion and Innovation to Decrease Marginalization and Drive Productivity).

Drivers

Calls for collaboration: Per the 2022 Gartner Justifying and Funding Innovation Survey,
innovation silos in organizations are a top inhibitor to innovation success, requiring innovation
leaders to create tactics, such as insight collection, that democratize the innovation process.

De-emphasizes ownership: Innovation ownership is often a gray area in organizations,

especially when “everyone is innovative,” making it difficult for innovation leaders to avoid
political mines throughout the process. Self-interest and the desire to win with innovation ideas
create territorial politics, which diminish the overall return and opportunity of innovation. This
can be prevented by insight collection, as it is more collaborative, with no clear ownership.

Creates an innovation culture: Creating and sustaining a culture of innovation is key for
innovation leaders, yet the process can fall into specialisms or blackbox R&D periods.
Techniques, such as insight collection, that open innovation up to the organization are required.

Obstacles

The innovation process can have an overt focus on ideas, which inadvertently creates self-
interested initiatives, whereas the process of innovation is meant to be collaborative and
evolving, and should facilitate learning.

The politics that surround innovation can be negative, time-consuming and project-damning,
and can create financial pressures. It is imperative that innovation leaders work toward an
innovation process that remains open.

Innovation is vague when not a clear and accounted-for practice in an organization. Great
inspiration and great ideas must have a clear process of consideration and a transparent road
to actualization that inspires and teaches the entire organization to be innovative.

User Recommendations

Identify the core categories for insights and define requisites for each. Examples of categories
include technologies-to-watch, customer feedback, culture moves, problem-reporting (solution-
needed area), competitive analysis, industry research/findings, trend-spotting and investment
radar.

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Create a platform for submission/collection. This can be as simple as an online submission

form, email submissions, or a day/workshop dedicated to the opening phase of an innovation.

Set a cadence for how often submissions are reviewed and considered.

Align innovation priorities to submissions, and be prepared to reevaluate based on collected

insights.

Be transparent on next steps when a collected insight becomes an Innovation Trigger.

OKR for Innovation
Analysis By: Mordecai ., Owen Chen

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

Adopting the objectives and key results (OKR) framework for innovation priorities, OKR for
innovation brings flexible goal-setting to convert the innovation objectives and priorities of the
organizations into concrete and measurable operational results. By aligning innovation into OKR,
executive leaders distribute the engagement and responsibility necessary for growth across the
business.

Why This Is Important

OKR for innovation drives stakeholder engagement in innovation practices and is key to aligning
innovation with the overall business goals of the organization. By definition, OKR creates
accountability for organizations’ innovation work by setting and managing quantifiable strategic
goals, with clear measurements demonstrating how a clear purpose-built practice of innovation
benefits the business.

Business Impact

Establishing OKR for innovation sets an executive-level mandate for innovation in the organization,
pushing performance and promoting innovation while delivering focus, building cross-functional
alignment, and tracking progress and success. Engaging OKR for innovation sets innovation as a
high-priority objective in line with business growth opportunities. Further, cascading OKR across
stakeholders further defines everyones’ role in innovation and clearly assigns contribution.

Drivers

Accountability: Having clear and explicit responsibilities in the process and outcome of
innovation work allows for ownership, leadership, creativity and a streamlined path forward
toward the business objectives and priorities.

Measurement: Setting goals that are clearly defined for leadership and teams allows for a
transparent understanding of innovation’s intention. New routes to success can be decided with
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a clear objective in sight. OKR is meant to be flexible and adaptable during the innovation
process.
Executive buy-in: In the 2022 Gartner Justifying and Funding Innovation Survey, organizations
report being most effective in the design and management innovation stages by obtaining
executive buy-in.

Key stakeholder engagement: OKR for innovation sets prioritized objectives across the
organization, allowing for innovation to thread throughout and serve multiple teams in the
process.
Obstacles

Innovation can often be perceived as an ancillary activity, siloed and project-based, not seeded
into the overall business strategy, with difficulty in measuring “outcome success” when value
realization is not considered.

An overly simplistic binary (that is, it works or doesn’t) can commonly be the only measurement
for innovation exploration. This fails to maximize the lessons from and maturity of the process,
and failures or secondary outcomes may not be seen as successful.

A lack of executive buy-in diminishes the power of a company’s innovation work as it is not
perceived with the level of importance necessary to actualize its possibilities.

Being siloed is frequently cited as a hindrance by those with innovation responsibilities in

organizations as it reduces the ability to impact or serve business objectives.

User Recommendations

Establish OKR for innovation via executive committee development sessions and ensure OKRs for
innovation:

Identify and align with shared objectives in the business.

Set clear objectives with accountable measurements (don’t be number shy!).

Define contributions to innovation objectives for multiple stakeholders.

Track progress and remain accountable to results.

Remain flexible, address disruptions and adapt accordingly.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Everything CIOs Need to Know About OKRs

Ignition Guide for CIOs to Kickstart the OKR Process

How Executives Can Use OKR to Deliver Strategic Outcomes

Effectuation

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Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Darren Topham

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

Effectuation is an innovation principle about achieving the best possible utilization of resources by
keeping objectives flexible. Long-term development paths are not vehemently pursued in the early
phase of development but are determined by opportunities. Innovating according to this principle
requires a strong outward focus and a team that puts value realization above dogmatic goal
orientation.

Why This Is Important

Effectuation is the natural behavior of successful entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who maximize
the effectiveness of their resources by looking for the next best option and taking a vague
direction. Especially when innovation goals are unclear, effectuation is a powerful way to develop
unique business propositions. Effectuation orients on the means and not on the goal; therefore, it
does not require long-term plans or forecasts.

Business Impact

Startups and organizations in rapidly changing environments benefit from effectuation principles.
They can harness existing resources, skills and networks to identify and seize opportunities.
Effectuation’s agility encourages experimentation, learning from failures and adaptability. It
enables leaders to navigate uncertain markets. Moreover, effectuation principles foster
collaboration and co-creation. They empower strong leaders to drive innovation, resulting in a
responsive and partly resilient organization.

Drivers

Uncertainty and ambiguity: In dynamic and uncertain environments, effectuation offers a more
adaptable and flexible approach to decision making.

Resource constraints: Effectuation emphasizes working with available resources, making it

particularly suitable for startups or organizations with either limited funding/resources or a rich
pool of assets.

Emphasis on experimentation: Lean methods and the value of experimentation in innovation

have driven interest in effectuation, which encourages learning in iterations.

Focus on the individual: The innovator is at the center of the process, emphasizing personal
skills, experience and networks. This focus resonates well with the trend of individual
empowerment.

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Scalability: Effectuation is adaptable in context and scale, making it attractive to businesses of

different sizes and industries seeking lean and agile approaches to innovation with extremely
fast decision making.

Emphasis on action: Corporations in fast-paced industries, where long-term strategies are not
stable, take advantage of effectuation’s action orientation, leveraging the organization’s
responsiveness.
Obstacles

Roadmapping mindset: Organizations with a traditional top-down approach to decision making

and a desire for lasting plans resist the flexible and adaptive mindset required for effectuation
principles.

Sandbox for the “cool kids”: Some may view this approach as a reward for the most-favored
performers, giving them time away from delivery and execution to play with ideas. Others may
envy and speak ill of the effort.

Risk aversion: Effectuation principles demand risk acceptance and failure tolerance, which can
be challenging for organizations that prefer stability and minimal risks.

Insufficient skills and experience: The strength to rely on individuals can turn into a weakness
if their expertise does not match the intended development.

Resistance to collaboration: Working in partnerships for co-creation can lead to resistance in

siloed and competitive corporate cultures.

Difficulty scaling: Effectuation works well for small projects, but it is not suitable to drive a
huge corporate transformation.

User Recommendations

Enable effectuation principles by identifying and empowering employees with an outstanding

entrepreneurial mindset or by recruiting an external talent with these qualities.

Create new opportunities by inventorying existing resources, skills, partnerships and networks
that can be leveraged in the innovation process.

Adopt a mindset that accepts risks and tolerates failures by turning the metrics from estimated
revenue toward affordable loss.

Limit exploratory time with concepts by setting stage gates to progress or demote ideas. Track
all ideas, but prioritize those delivering value in a foreseeable time frame.

Reset organizational planning by implementing an iterative process, with real-time feedback

and market dynamics replacing rigid planning.

Communicate and celebrate success with the organization, for it will ease the uncertainty felt
by the workforce and foster an agile, entrepreneurial mindset.

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AI-Driven Innovation
Analysis By: Arun Chandrasekaran, Ankita Khilare

Benefit Rating: Transformational

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

AI-driven innovation is a process that harnesses the power of AI technologies to accelerate

innovation. It helps organizations unlock groundbreaking inventions in specialized domains, such
as new drugs and material science. Moreover, AI-driven innovation could boost agility and
efficiency across various industries, thus optimizing end-to-end innovations.

Why This Is Important

Advancements in AI and its democratizations are fueling innovations across various industries.
When AI technologies drive innovation, they can optimize products and services development
processes, enhance organizations’ productivity and agility, and boost efficiency. With the advent of
generative AI (GenAI), breakthroughs are expected in R&D, such as helping researchers process
vast amounts of data inside and outside their organizations, generate new insights and ideas, and
simulate experiments.

Business Impact

In the short term, AI-driven innovation will impact many business innovation areas, such as trend
identification, pattern matching and technology scouting. Also, it will help generate, test and
prototype ideas using agile, lean methodologies. AI can iterate generative designs for new ideas
against user preferences and target customers, considering their demographics, gender and race.
In the long term, it will help in the area of generative products and services development and alter
the speed and economics of innovation.

Drivers

Faster and improved ideation and prototyping: Innovation is about generating ideas. AI can
catalyze a wide range of innovations, removing the constraints of data and information
processing during the ideation process. By adding massive quantities of data and using pattern
recognition and other techniques, AI systems can generate more ideas and a vast pool of
hypotheses that can be tested before moving to the prototyping phase.

Competitive differentiation when creating innovative products: Recent advancements in

reinforcement learning have given rise to exciting new use cases. Examples include robotics
(contextual awareness), chemistry (optimizing molecular reactions) and autonomous vehicles.
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Breakthrough innovations with GenAI: The ideation process can get enhanced by analyzing
massive amounts of data. GenAI provides game-changing opportunities across various
industries, such as drug discovery and material science. Also, recent use cases include
optimizing prototype engineering and improving light and space efficiency in building design.
Obstacles

Creating a decision framework on where to use AI during the innovation process, selecting
which techniques to employ and ensuring adequate availability of data and other resources
present a challenge for some organizations.

Trend identification and pattern matching tools are based on natural language processing
(NLP). Gartner classifies NLP as an emerging technology. Although some commercial NLP
products are available, many are not yet fully proven.

While some high-value opportunities, like drug and material design, are at the early stages of
development, solutions supporting generated content and synthetic data are becoming
commercialized.

In certain domains, such as image generation, AI-generated artifacts do not count on any
copyright protection. This may decrease their value to enterprises.

AI tools designed to test feasibility are domain-specific and at varying maturity levels.

GenAI models carry inherent risks such as hallucinations and are capable of propagating bias
and toxicity at scale unless sufficiently mitigated. This can undermine trust in them.

User Recommendations

Shortlist specific areas where AI will augment your innovation process and allow you to bring
products to the market in faster and less expensive ways. Start with more proven areas, such
as trend identification, technology scouting and idea generation. These areas have higher
business relevance and easier operationalization.

Focus on AI management and employee training through AI and data literacy programs.
Increase access to quality data and model explainability to demystify the AI decision process.

Focus on AI as a tool for human augmentation in the innovation process.

Encourage experimentation among teams to gather hands-on experience on the various use
cases provided by AI-driven innovation, but architect sufficient risk mitigation steps.

Work with startups and vendors that can offer commercial solutions to address specific
innovation process challenges rather than building your own AI tool from scratch.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Innovation Guide for Generative AI Models

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Accelerate Innovation With AI for Competitive Advantage

Use-Case Prism: Artificial Intelligence for Technology Planning and Innovation

Use Generative AI in Applied Innovation to Drive Business Value

Lead User Method
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

The lead user method is an approach to innovation that involves identifying and collaborating with
lead users — individuals or companies at the forefront of market trends — to develop new
products and services. The relation between innovator and lead users is mutually beneficial, for
the innovator receives insights of a market to unfold, and the lead users gain reputation and later
save efforts for customization and adaption.

Why This Is Important

Lead users, being early adopters, anticipate market needs ahead of the curve. Lead users are not
necessarily power users, loaded with a depth of knowledge on a specific product. They
compensate for missing components with creative workarounds and extend the product usage as
needed. By integrating their insights, companies can create innovative solutions that have a higher
chance of market success and avoid pitfalls of basing developments on late and average users’
feedback.

Business Impact

By engaging with lead users, developers can tap into advanced insights and potential future
needs, enabling them to develop solutions with a higher market acceptance. The approach
promotes quicker adaptation to changes and customer needs through agile project development,
enhancing both product relevance and competitive advantage. It encourages creative problem
solving and forward thinking at the forefront of audience demand.

Drivers

Advanced market insights: Lead users provide a glimpse into future market trends.

Competitive advantage: Early adopter feedback helps companies seeking product leadership to
stay ahead of the competition.

Demand for customization: Increasing consumer demand for tailored products drives the need
for early adopter insights.

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Time to market and focus: Lead users accelerate the innovation process by focusing on proven
real-world needs.
Obstacles

Identifying true lead users: Distinguishing between genuine trendsetters and average users can
be challenging.

Avoiding sales strategies: Lead users are not necessarily important customers from a sales
perspective. Therefore, development advisory boards and lead users should be treated
separately.

Limited scope: Innovations developed using insights from lead users might not appeal to the
broader market.

Resource allocation: Effective engagement between innovators and lead users requires a
substantial time commitment from both parties.

User Recommendations

Develop robust criteria for identifying lead users (not power users) to ensure genuine foresight
and market relevance.

Build a flexible development environment that can integrate and act on lead user feedback
effectively.

Reduce the number of people involved in communication to overcome the telephone game
effect and connect developers directly with lead users.

Balance innovations derived from lead users with broader market needs to ensure wide market
acceptance. Harden results from lead user tests with quick acceptance tests (e.g., pretotypes).

Allocate dedicated resources to manage and nurture lead user relationships to maximize the
potential benefits.

Gartner Recommended Reading

How R&D Can Assess Customer Value During Product Development

Decision Models That Fit Your R&D Profile

Transformation Opportunities Assessment (Product/Service Transformation Phase 1)

Chief Innovation Officer
Analysis By: Mordecai ., Tsuneo Fujiwara

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

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Definition:

A chief innovation officer, on or reporting to the board of directors, provides accountability and
greater opportunity for enterprisewide innovation. Board signoff positions an organization’s
innovation work for greater planning, broader utilization in multifunction engagements and higher
return on investment.

Why This Is Important

Having a chief innovation officer creates executive accountability and enables executive leaders
to effectively implement protocols, strategies and support for an impactful innovation practice.
Chief innovation officers or executive leaders of innovation are focused on business goals, such
as revenue, opportunities and reputation. By serving on the board or reporting to the board, they
are better positioned to align innovation funding requests with board priorities.

Business Impact

A chief innovation officer, in collaboration with the board, aligns executive leadership to a practice
of innovation that services the needs of the organization as a whole. Focused on board
expectations, specifically the organizational and commercial goals that innovation can address,
the officer implements effective innovation programs that drive growth. The sponsorship and
authority provided by the board are important for this type of innovation.

Drivers

The following organizational requirements are fueling the need for a chief information officer that
answers to the board:

Innovation leadership: The 2023 Gartner Innovation Trends Survey found that 63% of
respondents had enterprisewide innovation leadership, such as a chief innovation officer or a
similar role (see Tool: Chief Innovation Officer Job Description). This finding demonstrates not
only the adoption rate of the role, but also the importance of instilling responsibility for
innovation in leaders across the executive committee.

Accountability and efficiency: Defining companywide innovation goals, best practices and a
regular rate of review not only encourages accountability to budget and resources, but also
provides transparency to business goals that employees across the organization can support.
Moreover, an enterprisewide focus on innovation can avoid duplication of innovation efforts
across siloed business organizations.

Block funding: Based on the 2022 Gartner Justifying and Funding Innovation Survey, IT and
business leaders responsible for innovation in high-maturity organizations are more likely to
use block funding for innovation (see Get Rounds of Block Funding Approved With Agile
Adaptive Budgeting).

Global disruption strategies: Political, environmental, economic, technological and social

disruptions are consistently increasing. Board-led innovation offers leadership in uncertain
times and proactive innovative solutions to global disruptions. Disruptions are mitigated

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through an executive-led innovation practice that engages relevant stakeholders across the
business.
Obstacles

Midlevel innovation management: Innovation is being managed at the middle level, not the
executive level. Siloed teams, projects and event management minimize the impact of
innovations by rarely aligning them with business goals.

Ad hoc spending: Individual business units allocate project-based budgets for innovation.

Fear of the unknown: Organizations are reactive when implementing innovation. They succumb
to disruption, rather than embrace it as an opportunity.

Transformation lag: Issues ranging from the length of the procurement process to the number
of stakeholders seeking ownership of innovative technologies can stall transformation. Such
issues hinder the flexibility needed to adapt and grow the business.

User Recommendations

Appoint a chief innovation officer to lead board-mandated innovation initiatives with clear
business objectives. Hold the role accountable for results across a full measurement spectrum,
including failure rate, employee engagement percentage and actionable insights. (See Tool:
Chief Innovation Officer Job Description for sample responsibilities.)

Allocate block funding for innovation across the organization under a chief innovation officer.
Establish swift signoff protocols to expedite response to disruptions.

Empower innovation by exhibiting it as a core value, communicating leadership support and

fostering a culture of innovation from the top.

Stress-test scenarios and solidify a best-practice framework for disruptive innovations, cultural
shifts and technology transformations.

Gartner Recommended Reading

A Chief Innovation Officer Is Needed to Lead Innovation Effectively

Tool: Chief Innovation Officer Job Description

Company Builder
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Apoorva Chhabra

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Adolescent

Definition:

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Company builders are service providers who do the groundwork for founding new companies and
business units. Their business model is to enable corporate development to catch up on ever-
changing markets and tap into new opportunities with experienced entrepreneurs. Their venture-
as-a-service spectrum ranges from incubation to the scaling of business, but unlike accelerator
programs, they act either as startup studios or venture builders for corporations, and the team
moves on to the next project.
Why This Is Important

Company builders deliver the resources for the fast development of ideas into an actual product,
service or organization. They are packed with serial entrepreneurs with experience in fields that
have scarce talent availability like AI, e-mobility, fintech, robotics or medtech. Corporate company
builders are aiming to build new models with a target business unit in mind. Their work can be
financed via one-off payments, equity or revenue shares, and therefore, fit different budgets and
models.

Business Impact

Company builders enable organizations to overcome their own innovation limitations and
corporate heritage, and to rapidly innovate, develop and scale new ventures in a highly efficient
and targeted manner. Shared resources, expertise and proven methods increase the likelihood of
success and minimize organizational risks. Company builders promote focused innovation efforts
in specific industries or markets, allowing organizations to establish a strong competitive
advantage.

Drivers

Speed and efficiency: Company builders leverage shared resources, expertise and
infrastructure to launch new ventures. Proven methods and a focused innovation effort result in
rapid iterations of development close to the corporate innovation goal.

Risk mitigation: By sorting many issues before the project starts, company builders are
effectively reducing the risk for corporations and increasing the likelihood of success in
innovation and disruption in new and established businesses.

Access to talent and expertise: Company builders attract and retain experienced entrepreneurs,
designers, engineers and other highly specialized professionals. This provides organizations
access to scarce talent with specialized skills and knowledge.

Scalability and growth: Independent ventures with dedicated teams can quickly scale
successful projects. By designing directly for the market or a later integration as a function, the
projects are already set up for rapid growth and adoption.

High demand for innovation: Resources for innovation with expertise and capacity are limited
in many organizations. Company builders come for a price, but they can grant access to
innovation capabilities and experience.

Obstacles

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Alignment of interests: Aligning the goals and objectives of the corporation and the company
builder can be challenging, as both parties may have different strategic priorities.

Financial interests: Both parties need to agree on funding and sharing in equity or revenue.

Cultural differences: Company builders typically establish a different working culture that is
agile, entrepreneurial and risk-tolerant. Bridging between the two cultures can be difficult.

Intellectual property: Issues related to ownership, licensing and revenue-sharing can be

complex, depending on the preset alignment of interests between the corporation and the
company builder.

Bureaucracy: In large organizations, long and complex decision-making processes can slow
down innovation, frustrating the company builder and its partners.

Internal resistance: The value of a company builder is often underestimated by internal

resources, as individual fragments seem solvable to them, ignoring their own available capacity
and topic complexity.
User Recommendations

Prepare for collaboration with a company builder by clearly outlining the goals and desired
outcomes. Also, make sure the appetite for risk and desired success scenario is defined.

Partner with the right company builder by researching and evaluating prospects based on their
track record, expertise, industry focus and alignment with the organization’s objectives.

Avoid disagreements later by setting a clear scope of collaboration, financial commitments,

intellectual property rights and industry-specific requirements in formal agreements.

Use the collaboration to improve capabilities by learning the company builder’s methods,
processes and networks.

Prepare for the handover by setting up required resources in time, and provide necessary
infrastructure and management support to help scale and integrate successful ventures.

Sample Vendors

Bridgemaker; Excubate; Founders Factory; Innovify; Itscalable Ventures; JUSTROCKET;

Rainmaking; Stryber; WhatAVenture
Business Model Innovation Framework
Analysis By: Daniel Sun, Marcus Blosch

Benefit Rating: Transformational

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:
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The business model innovation framework is a scenario-planning foundation that enables

organizations to foster technology-enabled innovations in the areas of customer experience (CX),
value propositions, capabilities and financial models. It is often used in ideation and innovation
workshops to create a new business model as a goal of digital business transformation.
Why This Is Important

A well-designed business model is the basis of sustainable competitive advantage. Leveraging

the business model innovation framework in the process of digital business transformation
enables the organization to design and improve business models. The business model innovation
framework reveals clear paths on which to build the organizational innovation strategy. More
importantly, a business model innovation framework supports moving innovation from the “in
theory” stage to the planning phase.

Business Impact

A business model innovation framework offers a checklist of 30 strategic business initiatives and
scenarios. Organizations can leverage Gartner’s Toolkit: A Guide for Business Model Ideation and
Innovation Workshops in Times of Disruption, which is built on this framework to run do-it-
yourself (DIY) digital business model ideation and innovation workshops. DIY capacity is
important because organizations need to enhance their capabilities of independent planning to
accelerate their speed of business transformation.

Drivers

Drivers for adopting a business model innovation framework to innovation include:

The need to accelerate digital innovations and achieve more dividends from digital business
transformations to cope with economic headwinds, talent shortages and other disruptions

An urgency to fill the constant gaps between IT’s deliverables and business imperatives

Increasing competition from new entrants or business models that disrupt the industry

Obstacles

Obstacles to adopting the business model innovation framework include:

Poor business and IT alignment, resulting in a lack of collaboration. Then it is impossible to

leverage the framework to run business model innovation and ideation workshops successfully.

Lack of strong executive commitment. Executives must commit their time — ideally, twice a
year, with a couple of days of on-site meetings — to orchestrate business model innovation and
ideation workshops.

Lack of strong business knowledge from IT. It is essential for IT to collaborate with the
business to leverage the framework to run or participate in the workshops, especially for digital
business innovation.

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Getting business executives to focus on longer-term vision and scenarios. This is especially
true when the current business model is delivering satisfactory financial results.
User Recommendations

Adopt the business model innovation framework as a component of the overall innovation
strategy.

Ensure that executives and participants fully understand the overall strategy and objective of
the company before applying the frameworks to innovate current or create new business
models.

Use the framework to identify the most relevant action items for innovating current business
models or creating new ones. Then IT can plan digital initiatives supporting the execution of
those identified business model innovation actions.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Toolkit: A Guide for Business Model Ideation and Innovation Workshops in Times of Disruption

Reshape Business Models Using Generative AI

Case Study: A Calibrated Approach to Amplify Business-Led Innovation (Standard Bank Group)
LEGO Serious Play
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:

LEGO Serious Play (LSP) is an open-sourced workshop methodology developed by LEGO.

Grounded in research from cognitive psychology and learning, LSP encourages hands-on, minds-
on learning through building, sharing and reflecting. Participants construct physical models to
represent ideas or solutions, fostering dialogue and collaboration. LSP offers two formats for
innovation, “real-time strategies for the enterprise” and “the beast,” with the latter analyzing and
solving critical problems.

Why This Is Important

The complexity of business is increasing, and interdependencies between processes and

structures require interdisciplinary work across different domains, hierarchies and backgrounds.
LSP helps break down barriers and promotes open dialogue and deeper understanding of different
perspectives. LSP can improve team cohesion, drive innovation and support strategic decision
making. It reenergizes the creativity of innovation teams fatigued with ideas on a particular
problem and unlocks hidden insights to explore complex challenges.

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Business Impact

LSP leverages organizational knowledge and can be applied without innovation experience among
participants. The method enables all team members to visualize and communicate about
complex challenges, maximizing resource efficiency. The process leads to a better understanding
of the problem by promoting active participation from all team members, ensuring diverse inputs
and breaking down hierarchical barriers.
Drivers

Increased complexity: Businesses face increasingly complex challenges. LSP offers a tangible,
hands-on approach to problem solving, enabling participants to visualize, communicate and
explore ideas in a simple way.

Inclusivity and collaboration: LSP is an easy-to-adapt process that focuses on participation

among team members. It is hard to break multiple barriers in innovation, such as language,
hierarchy, communication styles or cultural backgrounds, to search for the best ideas. LEGO
Serious Play enables all participants to contribute equally, promoting large diverse teams in the
ideation process. LSP unlocks innovation potential, also within the individuals, by stimulating
different brain areas that are untapped during many other thinking-only activities.

Need for alignment: In complex environments, teams need to align on common goals, shared
understanding and decision making to implement new strategies. LSP supports these critical
transformational communication processes by bringing together the people creating the
strategy in a low barrier environment.

Emphasis on creativity: Many corporate teams struggle with creativity and innovation. The
playful, creative character of LSP enables those teams to overcome their resistance and
encourages them to practice innovative thinking and idea generation.

Obstacles

Skepticism: Participants connect LEGO bricks with play and, usually, not with a professional
context.

Confusion: It is not immediately clear how arranging physical LEGO bricks relates to innovation
in complex challenges.

Resistance to play: Some participants may struggle to embrace the playful, hands-on nature of
LSP.

Organizational resistance: Corporate cultures resistant to unconventional methods or open

dialogue can hinder LSP adoption.

Limited scalability: LSP may be less effective for very large groups, or when addressing
organizationwide or unspecific challenges.

User Recommendations

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Don’t get lost in activity by setting specific goals and desired outcomes for LSP sessions. LSP
can be used for a variety of activities, such as strategy development, process optimization and
innovation.

Don’t play; innovate. By hiring or finding a certified LSP facilitator to run the session, you make
sure it follows a structured, engaging and effective process.

Get everyone out of their work routine by setting up the session in a comfortable environment
with enough lighting, workspace and bricks to build.

Take it seriously. Despite its playful character, allocate sufficient time for the LSP sessions,
which could run between hours and days, depending on the complexity of the objectives. Refine
your outcomes and deliver evidence and suggested procedures.

Make sure LSP leaves the ideation stage by capturing outcomes, insights and learnings from
the sessions through detailed photographs, notes and recordings. Provide management with
information, strategy, results and decisions.
Sample Vendors

BearingPoint; LeanSP; PLAY SERIOUS AKADEMIE; Play4Business; Progressive Play

Gartner Recommended Reading

Align Inclusion and Innovation to Decrease Marginalization and Drive Productivity

Enterprise Architects Combine Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile to Drive Digital
Innovation
Moonshot Thinking
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: Transformational

Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Maturity: Embryonic

Definition:

Moonshot thinking is a big and bold approach to innovation that aims to tackle large-scale
challenges by pursuing transformative solutions, rather than incremental improvements. Inspired
by the Apollo 11 mission, it encourages 10x leaps, interdisciplinary collaboration and emerging
technologies exploitation. Moonshot thinking embraces risk and the possibility of failure, with the
ultimate goal of creating significant, positive impact on the world through breakthrough
innovations.

Why This Is Important

Moonshot thinking fosters transformative innovation that can create significant competitive
advantages. By targeting large-scale challenges and pursuing ambitious goals, enterprises can
unlock new markets, drive sustainable growth and stay ahead of industry disruptions. It
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encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, enhances problem solving and cultivates a culture of

risk-taking and resilience; all are crucial for long-term success in today’s rapidly evolving business
landscape.
Business Impact

Moonshot thinking is appealing to visionary leaders who aim to create lasting impact, such as
Meta’s connectivity labs, SpaceX and Mars colonization, the human genome project or the U.S.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s autonomous vehicle challenge.
Differentiating through ambitious goals can drive long-term growth, inspire talent and meet
evolving consumer demands. It’s important for industries such as technology, healthcare or
energy that face rapid disruption or complex challenges, or that focus on long-term impact.

Drivers

Rapid technological advancements: The pace of progress in emergent technologies

encourages organizations to think beyond incremental improvements and fosters the desire to
explore transformative innovations.

New business opportunities: The pursuit of “moonshots” usually leads to secondary

innovations that can be used in other contexts and offer added value, even if the ultimate goal
is not achieved.

Market disruption: Moonshot thinking always comes with a flavor of industry disruption and
establishes new and unconventional solutions that organizations adopt to stay competitive.

Global awareness: Pressing issues such as wars, climate change, resource scarcity and
pandemics demand bold and innovative solutions.

Ambitious corporate visions: Visionary leadership pays off in shareholder interests. Moonshot
thinking enables long-term strategic thinking to create a lasting impact.

Public-private interest: Because of these innovations’ impact, they are often in the public
interest, making them eligible for additional funding and support from governments that benefit
from them.

Consumer demand: Moonshots often get public attention, creating their own demand. Highly
informed consumers also push corporations toward more radical solutions.

Radical differentiation: Companies adopting moonshots can differentiate themselves from

competitors, creating a unique identity.

Purpose-driven culture: An emerging generation of consumers and employees seeks

organizations with missions beyond profit, often represented by strong hero leaders’ narratives.

Obstacles

Leadership: The transformation needed cannot be driven in a bottom-up approach with low
priority and limited bandwidth. To be successful, it needs to be backed by top management,

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securing resources and organizational commitment.

Risk aversion: Organizations may be hesitant to embrace risks or change associated with bold,
transformative projects.

Lack of interdisciplinary collaboration: Siloed departments or teams can hinder the exchange
of diverse perspectives and ideas.

Short-term focus: An emphasis on short-term goals and immediate returns may overshadow
long-term projects.

Lack of transparency: Organizations struggle to quantify returns on moonshot thinking and

forecast potential revenue.

Failure to adapt: Difficulties adjusting strategies or learning from setbacks stall the progress
toward ambitious goals.

Implementation challenges: Scaling and deploying transformative solutions can be complex,

requiring careful planning and execution.
User Recommendations

Structure moonshots by planning beyond incremental improvements and aim for long-term
goals by advocating for and aligning them with corporate goals.

Aim for sustainable and apportioned value creation by demonstrating the financial and
nonfinancial benefits of moonshot innovations to the stakeholders.

Build a dedicated team or lab outside of corporate processes responsible for identifying,
developing and pursuing moonshots.

Adopt a fail-fast mentality to encourage experimentation and learning from failure by

demanding transparency and active communication within the organization.

Accept the high-risk, high-reward nature of moonshots by allocating and buffering resources
and funding to support the projects.

Ensure that projects stay on rails by setting clear milestones and defining shared success
expectations.

Gartner Recommended Reading

5 Success Habits of the Digital Dragons and Giants

3 Behaviors Executive Leaders Should Master to Lead Innovation

Pretotyping
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Tsuneo Fujiwara

Benefit Rating: High

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Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

Pretotyping is an innovation method of market penetration testing before prototyping to measure

market acceptance and obtain development consequences within a few hours or days.
Pretotyping is a portmanteau of “pretend” and “prototyping.” Techniques include humans imitating
a machine’s work (mechanical turk), enabling access to a pretend product (fake-door tests),
presenting similar existing products (relabel) and nonfunctional, shallow versions of products
(Pinocchio).

Why This Is Important

Pretotyping decreases the resources spent before the actual development even starts. It does not
focus on elaborating an idea, but quickly ensuring you’re working on the right thing before building
it right. Pretotyping is based on a few principles (for example, now beats later, commitment beats
committees, data beats opinion) and enables fast decision making in an early design stage. It is
fast to learn, problem-adaptive and delivers meaningful insights to improve development.

Business Impact

Pretotyping is most beneficial for organizations that need to innovate quickly and bring new
products and services to market efficiently. Pretotyping ensures resources are allocated
effectively, saving time and money, while increasing the likelihood of success. Pretotyping
promotes a customer-centric solution, helping businesses large and small understand and
address their target audience’s preferences. It empowers organizations to stay competitive in
rapidly evolving markets.

Drivers

Rapid innovation: In heavily competitive environments, organizations are under pressure to

innovate quicker and bring new products and services to market faster than their rivals. The rise
and the emphasis on minimum viable products (MVPs) have contributed to the popularity of
pretotyping as a way to test and validate ideas by getting critical insights prior to larger
resource investments.

Cost and resource efficiency: Pretotyping saves time and money by identifying product-market
fit and potential issues early in the development process, before investing in deeper product
development.

Fail-fast mentality: Embracing failure as an opportunity for iteration has become common in
modern business environments. Pretotyping not only supports this mindset by allowing
organizations to quickly test, learn and pivot, it also reduces developers’ emotional attachment
to the tested objects.

Customer centricity: Pretotyping is at the heart of understanding customers’ needs and

preferences; it both shows ideas and requests action from possible users. This approach

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ensures new products and services are more likely to succeed in the market.
Data-driven decision making: Pretotyping eliminates gut feeling in decision making by
providing valuable data on customer behavior, reactions and potential demands.

Scalability: Pretotyping can be applied to projects of varying size and complexity, making it
attractive for all sizes of organizations and industries.
Obstacles

Fear of failure: Traditional organizations may be reluctant to adopt the fail-fast mentality and
fear a negative brand perception, or even reputational damage.

Overemphasis on speed: The focus on rapid experimentation may lead to insufficient depth in
analysis or the exploration of alternative solutions, resulting in suboptimal development.

Intellectual property concerns: Sharing early-stage ideas and prototypes with potential
customers or partners could expose the corporation to a fast-following competitor. It can also
affect a patenting process.

Short-term focus: A strong pretotyping culture may lead to prioritizing short-term wins over
long-term strategic goals, exposing the organization to developmental risks.

User Recommendations

Encourage a fast-failure culture by creating an environment where employees feel empowered

to test new ideas and develop them in rapid iterations.

Ensure a comprehensive approach by assembling cross-functional teams with different skills

and expertise to work on pretotyping projects.

Address customer needs by prioritizing feedback and iterating on initial ideas.

Keep your efforts low by developing minimal representations in a low-cost simplification of the
product or service to gather feedback and validate market abilities.

Focus on data by designing and conducting quick experiments to test with real customers and
gather their reaction and preferences.

Maintain focus by setting clear objectives and success criteria despite the fast iterations.
Define metrics and benchmarks, ensuring an alignment with corporate strategy or product
strategy.
Democratized Innovation
Analysis By: Darren Topham, Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

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Definition:

Democratized innovation occurs when responsibility for technology innovation exploration and
delivery shifts from the IT organization to business technologist elsewhere in the business, driven
by a wider business desire for more control and ownership of technology innovation.

Why This Is Important

The 2023 Gartner Innovation Trends Survey found that 41% of individuals responsible for
technology delivery (“business technologists”) report outside of IT. As these individuals explore,
create and experiment, innovation becomes democratized, leading to less and less oversight and
control from the IT department. CIOs, CTOs and other executive leaders must balance the trade-
off between ensuring that technology enables business agility in the face of disruption and
mitigating risks and consequences for IT.

Business Impact

The potential for increasing autonomy and opacity from democratized innovation can pose risks
to CIOs and IT departments, particularly regarding security, interoperability and considerations
around nonfunctional requirements for innovation scaling and adoption. This can result in
increasing risks to the business as well as unanticipated demands on IT when business-led
innovations require scaling, integration or increased licensing. There is also the potential for
unintended consequences such as cybersecurity and legal or regulatory requirement exposure.

Drivers

The democratization of innovation is inevitable as the increasing strategic importance of

innovation leads to a desire for greater ownership and control of innovation across the
enterprise. This is coupled with a demand for faster innovation cycles by businesses as they
look to gain an increasing advantage from innovation outcomes.

An increasingly tech-capable workforce outside of IT, along with access to increasingly

sophisticated toolsets (low-code/no-code, GenAI, etc.), is accelerating the demand.

IT departments have a limited capacity to service this growing need, so a desire for more
innovation autonomy and self-fulfillment from the wider business is understandable, but CIOs
cannot afford to be the “road blockers” to this shift.

Obstacles

Democratized innovation teams usually don’t have the perspective or resources to take on
enterprisewide initiatives, particularly in areas such as nonfunctional requirements (security,
interoperability, enterprise architecture, regulatory concerns, etc.).

Decentralized innovation initiatives can be suboptimal and duplicate existing resources and
solutions from other areas of the organization.

Localized innovation teams are often unaware of or not incentivized to think about or plan for
scalability and wider adoption.

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Democratized innovation teams can fail to follow best working practices and methods,
resulting in increasing deviation from established business design standards.

A traditional IT command-and-control approach to democratized innovation can cause it to

become stifled and lose its ability to reach a confident business-led outcome quickly.

Many enterprises have not built their self-serve platforms/tools (e.g., Robotics Process
Automation) that are critical for democratized innovation.
User Recommendations

Ensure that democratized innovation does not occur accidentally or in an unorchestrated

manner. There needs to be a mechanism for coordination, communication and adaptive levels
of governance and execution rights to mitigate the risks and cost of uncontrolled innovation
adoption.

Co-design and formalize an approach to democratized innovation practice, ensuring CIOs and
executive leaders share ownership and accountability for its application.

Train localized and non-IT innovation teams on the basics of nonfunctional requirements to
increase awareness and highlight where increasing risk will require increasing levels of IT
involvement.

Create an adaptive governance framework for democratized innovation that allows for the right
balance of autonomy and control based upon ambition, complexity and business criticality.

Create communities of practice for nurturing democratized innovations.

Provide a common toolset and infrastructure that is designed for innovation self-fulfillment but
from a common platform.

Gartner Recommended Reading

The CIO’s Guide to Innovation Governance

Distributed Innovation: Technology Innovation Leaders Can Help Business Technologists to

Innovate More Independently

Amplify Business-Led Technology Innovation

Case Study: Scale and Democratize Innovation via Annual Digital Competitions

Case Study: A Calibrated Approach to Amplify Business-Led Innovation (Standard Bank Group)
Combinatorial Disruption
Analysis By: Marty Resnick, Daryl Plummer, David Sugden

Benefit Rating: Transformational

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

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Maturity: Embryonic

Definition:

Combinatorial disruption happens when two or more disruptions overlap or influence one another
to create a new, distinctly disruptive effect. Combinatorial disruptions emerge from the interaction
or combination of multiple factors, signals, events, forces or disruptive trends. Each of these may
be independently manageable or predictable, but together, they create unique, often unpredictable
and potentially more complex scenarios.

Why This Is Important

Combinatorial disruptions can amplify the effects of individual disruptions, leading to emergent
behaviors (e.g., new modes of content consumption or perhaps crowdsourced value streams) or
outcomes that are not easily anticipated by considering each component in isolation. This
complexity requires a nuanced approach to understanding, planning for and managing the risks
associated with such disruptions.

Business Impact

Businesses that effectively harness combinatorial disruptions can:

Achieve market leadership and disrupt existing markets, leading to the displacement of
incumbents.

Establish themselves as leaders of new markets emerging from combinations of preexisting

markets where the field is less crowded.

Drive innovation by instigating combinational disruptions, empowering businesses to blend

elements that will catalyze innovative products, services and business models previously
unimaginable.

Drivers

In rapidly changing business environments, the intentional consideration of combinatorial

disruptions is being driven by:

The desire to create novel solutions that disrupt traditional markets by combining emerging
technologies.

A growing consumer demand for personalized, efficient and eco-friendly products and services.

The need to address new regulations through innovative, integrated solutions.

The threat of new entrants or the actions of existing competitors, which can spur companies to
adopt combinatorial disruptions as a defensive strategy to protect their market position.

The crucial need to have the ability to quickly adapt and innovate.

The need to optimize resource use and reduce environmental impact.

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Obstacles

Corporate culture can stifle any influx of new processes and methods.

Developing the ability to avoid legacy thinking is difficult.

The initial investment required to adopt combinatorial disruptions can be substantial.

The integration of multiple technologies increases the complexity of the systems involved.

Uncertainties and potential compliance issues exist.

Concerns about data security and privacy exist.

There are uncertainties as to whether investment in combinational disruption will pay off.

Sometimes disruption happens by chance or organically.

User Recommendations

Create a culture that routinely explores combinatorial thinking and challenges current
assumptions.

Assess current investments and determine those innovations that could be enhanced by
combining multiple disruptions together. Using visualizations like emerging technology radars
could help.

Explore the impact of multiple trends and disruptions coming together — from the lens of
exploiting new ideas as well as weighing potential risks — when considering signals.

Consider shockwaves, aftershocks or secondary effects when considering response to

disruptions.

Gartner Recommended Reading

The Top Trends and Forces Impacting Strategic Planning: Tapestry 2024

Visual Insight: 7 Disruptions to Help Prioritize Digital Innovation, 2023-2028

Gartner Futures Lab Podcast: 7 Disruptions You Might Not See Coming
At the Peak
Venture Client Model
Analysis By: Christian Stephan, Peter Skyttegaard

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Adolescent

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Definition:

Venture clients are companies that source high-potential business models or cutting-edge
technology from startups and accept a high risk of failure for the prospect of making progress in
their innovation efforts. Engaging with the startup is granting them some influence on the
development in a lead-user manner. The startups’ willingness to co-development significantly
reduces the sourcing burden for a venture capital management vehicle.
Why This Is Important

The venture client model (VCM) is less complicated and faster than joint venture or venture
capital (VC) vehicles for working with startups. It takes away many legal steps and due diligence
activities. The financial efforts are lower and an attractive option for innovation teams with tight
budgets. The compact collaboration model lets venture clients control the risk of early
development, allows early integration testing, and simultaneously enables them to benefit from
talent and get ahead of the competition.

Business Impact

The VCM is ideal for industries with high barriers to entry and complex solutions. Targeting
established corporations in these areas grants startups interesting niches. This model
streamlines access to disruptive technologies, and still reduces costs. It works for large and
midsize enterprises with dedicated innovation resources that can establish and uphold the startup
relation and moderate between business and technology units pursuing cutting-edge solutions
from startups.

Drivers

Startup ecosystem growth: The global startup ecosystem has seen significant growth in recent
years. Numerous startups develop innovative technologies and solutions, often in the niches of
global giant’s operations. This growth provides more opportunities for organizations to engage
mutually beneficially with startups.

Accelerated innovation: Companies are increasingly seeking ways to access external

innovations for competitiveness and growth. The VCM offers collaboration with promising
startup solutions and technologies.

Agility and flexibility: The pace of technological change and market disruption overloaded
organizations’ ability to adapt. They seek out more agile and flexible models for innovation, and
the VCM offers an alternative to classic VC capital and R&D processes.

Risk management: Accessing innovations always comes with some risks. The VCM enables
corporations to test and validate solutions before making significant changes to their
organization or implementing the solution.

Faster time to market: The time between early adoption and late following is squeezed in many
markets, and customer expectations on adoption have increased. The VCM enables
organizations to leap over long development periods and accelerate their market response.

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Talent exposure: Large organizations struggle to attract talented experts with specialized skills,
knowledge and experience in the sector of emerging technologies. Collaborating with startups
as a venture client helps to utilize their expertise and offers an opportunity to attract and
acquire talent.
Obstacles

Idea resistance: Often, seasoned business and development teams are resistant to external
startup suggestions and prefer in-house R&D (Not Invented Here syndrome).

Risk aversion: Although organizational risks of failure and implementation are reduced by co-
innovation with startups, committed companies must bear an additional risk of startup collapse
and loss of supplier in exchange.

Intellectual property concerns: The co-creation process leads to questions of ownership and
participation between startups and enterprises.

Bureaucrazy: Startup culture and enterprises especially clash in the decision-making

processes, and this hinders timely collaboration with agile startups.

Identifying suitable startups: Finding and attracting the right startups is time-consuming,
challenging and already competitive.

Regulatory issues: Corporations in highly regulated industries face significant challenges

working with startups and simultaneously staying compliant.

User Recommendations

Form an agile, cross-functional venture client team to foster the process from startup scouting
and evaluation to managing the collaboration.

Set up a clear evaluation catalog for assessing startups, considering technology, team, market
and solution fit, and align them with corporate goals.

Set up an exceptionally thin process to enable startup collaboration corresponding to your

industry, including, for example, procurement, legal, privacy, security and enterprise
architecture.

Connect with accelerators and incubators for startup, and get part of the startup ecosphere.

Ease founders’ access to your corporation by establishing clear communication channels for
startups.

Conduct pilot projects with startups, and test the startups’ ability to deliver and cultural fit.

Sample Vendors

Alchemist Accelerator; Bundl; Deloitte (27pilots); Founders Factory; Novable; Plug and Play;
TechFounders; Techstars

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Gartner Recommended Reading

The CIO’s Guide to Working With Startups

Partnering With Startups for Nimble Innovation

Virtual Innovation Labs
Analysis By: Gunjita Mundeja, Peter Skyttegaard, Tsuneo Fujiwara

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

A virtual innovation lab is a digital environment for collaboration, ideation, experimentation and
execution of new ideas that generate business value. It offers innovators an opportunity to
collaborate with global talent, yet work independently in their remote locations. It helps in pursuing
transformational innovation initiatives or co-developing beyond borders in distributed,
noncolocated environments, using digital platforms and tools for accessibility, flexibility and cost-
effectiveness.

Why This Is Important

A virtual innovation lab is a digital environment space where innovators get an independent
workspace with digital tools and technologies that help in collaboration, ideation and prototyping.
Labs are generally untethered by the pressures of short-term operational challenges, which further
diminish under a virtual lab. It offers a virtual innovation space that can be accessed by
borderless talent through a web browser or specialized software, and within that, users can
navigate and interact.

Business Impact

In a globally interconnected world, virtual labs help organizations harness the borderless talent,
creativity and perspectives of employees and other stakeholders. A virtual lab provides innovators
with the major benefits of an innovation lab and flexibility that enhances reachability and
productivity by providing a conducive work environment. A virtual lab enables an agile and
innovative culture that is better positioned to succeed in a highly distributed workforce or talent
pool.

Drivers

The increased adoption of a virtual-first digital workplace, where employees work remotely and
are fully equipped with the required tools and technologies to work and collaborate, organically
creates the conditions for the adoption of virtual innovation labs.

Talent shortage requires reachability to globalized talent, i.e., getting the right expertise, skills,
diverse perspective and ideas without any geographical barriers.

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A virtual innovation lab offers an independent work environment without being impacted by the
existing culture of radical experimentation for new developments.

Virtual innovation labs can be cost-effective, as they require less expenditure on real estate and
travel. This can help organizations save on operational costs, while still maintaining a high level
of innovation and productivity.

Virtual innovation labs increase the reachability of the lab ecosystem by collaborating with
customers and partners across the globe.

There is increasing access to technologies that enable work from anywhere in the world,
computing resources on demand and leveraging of digital tools to enhance the innovation
process. This not only facilitates collaboration across organizational boundaries but also
enables open innovation and knowledge sharing.
Obstacles

The success of a virtual innovation lab depends on a reliable and robust technology
infrastructure that sometimes becomes challenging.

Setting up a secure virtual environment that prevents data breaches and unauthorized access
as protecting intellectual property and sensitive information is critical for any innovation lab.

Virtual innovation labs require strong leadership to guide the team, so that all are working
toward common innovation goals, especially in the remote workplace that may have a lot of
distractions. Leadership is often challenged in providing clear direction and keeping the team
motivated for fostering a culture of innovation.

Some innovation processes, particularly those involving physical R&D and specialized tools,
may require a physical presence and access to specific equipment that cannot be easily
transmitted remotely. One must find a balance between virtual and physical components based
on the nature of the innovation project, available resources and team demands.

User Recommendations

Justify clearly the reason for investing in a virtual innovation lab by identifying the key reasons
as to why a virtual lab is a beneficial choice.

Establish specific strategic business goals and outcomes for the virtual innovation lab by
identifying key goals that can effectively be achieved virtually.

Analyze current business context and capabilities, and estimate gaps in capabilities and
infrastructures for the virtual lab. Set up business-focused metrics to track progress.

Build a clear technology plan that includes hardware, software and network security,
capabilities that are required to support collaboration and functioning of the virtual innovation
lab.

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Ensure that data security policies and guidelines are well worked upon, with security experts
involved in the planning, to avoid future data security breaches.

Plan the innovation process with all the virtual elements for the sustainable working of the lab.
Charter the different components of the innovation process and its requirements for a virtual
space.
Gartner Recommended Reading

Quick Answer: Why should you invest in a Should Executives Care About Virtual Innovation
Labs?
Data-Driven Innovation
Analysis By: Tsuneo Fujiwara, David Pidsley

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Mature mainstream

Definition:

Data-driven innovation (DDI) is the use of data and analytics (D&A) to develop or foster new
products, processes, organizational methods and markets. D&A can drive both the discovery and
the execution of innovation, and become the outcome in new business models, products and
services with a confirmed business value. DDI improves the speed and success rate of these
innovations through the exploration of data and correlations and the causal insights gained from
analyzing data.

Why This Is Important

DDI provides a more objective and pragmatic way to ideate or evaluate innovation ideas,
leveraging data versus perception, eloquence or authority when human intervention is required to
decide on the best innovation ideas or design patterns. Separately, data can also bring value to
organizations that share, sell or license it as data products. DDI enables both types of innovation.

Business Impact

DDI can have a high impact on all industries and on the digital innovation process itself. DDI
improves the speed and success rate of digital innovations through the exploration of data and
correlations and the causal insights gained from analyzing data. This means organizations can
gain efficiencies and effectiveness and create greater impact from innovating new digital
products and services.

Drivers

Digital business acceleration is increasingly moving socioeconomic activities online; lowering

the unit costs of data collection, storage and processing; and resulting in the generation and
use of vast amounts of data. Rich, immediate and reliable data provides a mechanism for
innovation ideas generation and evaluation, thus driving DDI.

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Recent acceleration in digital innovations is enabled by the adoption of data such as facial
recognition, customer preferences, product usage, employee activities, improved weather
forecasting and the monetization of sensor data in various industries. This acceleration is
driving organizations to utilize DDI processes so they don’t leave innovation ideation and
evaluation to chance.

Democratization of innovation transfers innovation activities to business units from earlier on in

the process, driving innovation toward realizing business values, thus favoring DDI to productize
the innovation instead of elongating R&D.

Recent advancements in AI provide an algorithmic and machine-driven way to test, accelerate

and scale innovation, which is based on data and analytics, thus driving DDI, and eventually
extending to AI-driven innovation.
Obstacles

Some organizations apply DDI without ensuring the goals of DDI align with their business goals.
Outcome-driven performance metrics are not very common in D&A functions. This
misalignment fails to create business value.

Without first establishing a culture of innovation, organizations are often unable to plan and
execute DDI. Many organizations still do not have a corporate culture that encourages critical
thinking.

D&A teams and the innovation team usually work in silos with limited or no collaboration.
Collaboration must be established before any DDI can be done.

DDI requires the innovation team to possess analytical modeling capabilities. Without these
capabilities, it will be unable to model a complex situation, which is usually quicker in data than
constructing mock-ups would be.

To productize the innovation so it realizes business value, it should be transferred to the

appropriate business units, which are ideally involved from early on. Unfortunately, most
innovation dies before being transferred to business units.

User Recommendations

Utilize DDI when creating a new product or a new service for digital innovation, including
business model innovation. DDI improves the speed and success rate of these innovations
through the exploration of data and correlations and the causal insights gained from analyzing
data. This is an improvement over conventional idea-based innovation, which starts with design
thinking or human-centered design that requires human intervention in ideation and idea
evaluation, often without data to provide quantifiable feasibility, likelihood for opportunities or
expected business outcomes.

Separately, consider if the data is useful enough to become a digital or data product when it has
reusable value in itself.

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Use predictive analytics capability and composite AI techniques to conduct a series of

experiments as an analytical model. Evaluate an innovation idea for different “what if?”
scenarios or event types. Assess an innovation using data and analytics to reduce the risk of
failure. For instance, multimodal generative AI capabilities to create new digital images, video,
audio, text or code can also produce novel scenarios or ideas.

Have strong data literacy in the organization, build D&A platforms and analytical tools, and
provide secure access to data.

Make decisions based on data and not authority.

Sample Vendors

Accenture; Cognizant; Deloitte; IdeaScale; Iprova; IPwe-Clarivate; KPMG; PwC; Tata Consultancy
Services; Wipro

Gartner Recommended Reading

Use Data-Driven Innovation to Achieve Digital Business Growth

Accelerate Digital Business Through Data-Enhanced Innovation Process

Introducing Data-Driven Innovation Framework for Digital Business Success

Quick Answer: How Do I Get Started With Data Monetization?

Case Study: Data Product Development to Prioritize Data Monetization (ZF Group)
Tapestry
Analysis By: Marty Resnick, David Sugden

Benefit Rating: Transformational

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Adolescent

Definition:

Tapestry is a methodology that equips executive leaders to determine the interconnection of

forces, disruptions, signals and trends across the areas of technological, political, economical,
social/cultural, trust/ethics, regulatory/legal and environmental (TPESTRE) to enhance their
strategic decision making.

Why This Is Important

To thrive in this age of disruption, merely looking at trends is not enough. Organizations must
consider the interconnection of forces, disruptions, trends and signals across the seven areas of
tapestry that will influence their organization’s future opportunities and risks. This will enable
organizations to adopt a deliberate approach to continuous foresight, help navigate disruptions
and set a path toward future-fitness.

Business Impact
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Using the tapestry methodology, organizations will be able to:

Anticipate plausible futures, enabling better predictions and model scenarios.

Advocate for those forces and trends that will have the most impact on the organization in
order to make more informed decisions and assess opportunities and risks, while optimizing
corporate investment strategies.

Accelerate innovation and future-test strategies.

Drivers

Organizations must make better-informed decisions in increasingly complex environments in the

short term and long term; tapestry can be used as an input to strategically plan for the critical
decisions, and critical systems that support those decisions:

Decrease complexity for dealing with exponential complications that will challenge both
business and operating models.

Embrace chaos by creating resilience from guarding against disruption, as well as, absorb it,
experience it and evolve from it.

Drive confidence in organizations for effective decision making amid an ever-evolving world of
uncertainty and persistent disruptions.

Tapestry helps leaders navigate these plausible futures by preparing the organization to operate
across four different “worlds”:

The world we live in: Our physical planet as defined by our physical surroundings.

The world we are exploring: The industrialization of space, which is defined by exploration,
commercialization and militarization.

The world we are building: The metaverse, along with the digital overlays and information from
spatial computing and geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), that blends the real world we
live in with the virtual one.

The world we are generating: The impact of generative AI (GenAI) and its growing ability to
create content and information in a democratized manner that is accessible to everyone.

Obstacles

According to the 2024 Gartner Operationalizing Trendspotting and Futurist Capabilities Survey,
61% of respondents have an ad hoc approach to trendspotting. This means they are not being
intentional enough to adopt a methodology like tapestry.

IT leaders tend to focus their trendspotting efforts on technology and do not strategically
consider how other areas (such as social or economic) may impact their point of view for future
recommendations.
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Traditional measures of success and ROI are not easily defined for adopting trendspotting and
methodologies such as tapestry.

The “ownership” and responsibility of trendspotting is spread across the organization creating
silos. This makes the interconnection of trends, forces, disruptions and signals impossible to
see.
User Recommendations

Organizations should adopt tapestry to:

Expand your focus beyond just technology.

Start with today and anticipate plausible futures.

Advocate for tomorrow and influence the future you want to see.

Accelerate change and innovation by acting now.

Assess the footprints, which represent their existing presence within a market or industry.
Explore new opportunities and mitigate risks to develop plans for footholds to scale and
expand into new markets across the four worlds beyond just digital transformation.

Use tapestry and other trendspotting frameworks as an input to scenario planning and
innovation.

Gartner Recommended Reading

The Top Trends and Forces Impacting Strategic Planning: Tapestry 2024

Gartner Futures Lab Podcast: Using Tapestry to Anticipate and Influence the Future

Early Signals to Prepare for Future Disruptive Trends

Innovation Ecosystems
Analysis By: Daniel Sun, Tsuneo Fujiwara, Nick Jones

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Adolescent

Definition:

An innovation ecosystem is an interconnected network of entities that co-evolve capabilities

around a shared set of technologies, knowledge or skills and work cooperatively and competitively
to develop new products, services and seamless customer experience to create value.

Why This Is Important

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Many digital business models are ecosystem-oriented, such as smart cities, healthcare, smart
homes and agriculture. Innovations in such areas often use ecosystems, especially when an
individual organization might lack the skills, resources or information to fully develop an idea.
Such ecosystems can span startups, academics, vendors and competitors. For example,
healthcare ecosystems could involve parties as diverse as academics, insurance companies,
physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Business Impact

Facing economic headwinds, companies must be smarter with their innovation efforts. They must
spend less and act faster than competitors. Innovation ecosystems are a good option since they:

Accelerate ideation, experimentation and collaboration.

Reduce time to market.

Share investment costs.

Diversify the risk of innovation bets.

Provide broader evidence of customer pain points and opportunities.

Enable innovations that could not be achieved by an organization acting on its own.

Drivers

Lack of a portfolio of capabilities and expertise often required for combinatorial innovations
involving multiple technologies.

Growth in ecosystem-oriented business models involving many collaborating participants.

Need to reduce the cost and risk of complex innovations.

Need to access a larger pool of ideas to drive innovation.

Need to reduce time to market for complex innovations.

Need to access a larger pool of information and insights than from within one enterprise.

Obstacles

Obstacles to innovation ecosystems are mostly related to the challenges of managing

relationships and collaboration between organizations with different goals and cultures. These
include:

Management and ownership of co-created intellectual property.

Allocation and distribution of funding and benefits.

Culture clashes among the participants.

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Internally focused mindset at some organizations that prefer to go alone.

Challenge of defining a clear operating model and legal basis for collaboration.

Shift in mindset to reflect the fact that profits are shared across multiple participants.
User Recommendations

Consider innovation ecosystems as a component of the overall innovation strategy to be used

when:

Conducting any innovation activity as part of your innovation strategy that could benefit from an
external perspective, such as when evaluating vendors or tracking startups.

Exploiting an innovation that demands an ecosystem business and operating model.

Lacking the expertise, market information or funding at the organization to develop an idea
alone, or wanting to spread the risks associated with innovation more widely.

Leverage innovation ecosystems fully for digital success by:

Constructing the “DNA” of innovation ecosystems, which includes the value exchange, diverse
partners, shared capabilities and rules of engagement.

Evolving innovation ecosystems by continuously managing, measuring, monitoring and

improving their performance.

Building a digital ecosystem fusion team that consists of domain experts like ecosystems
modeling and process-thinking experts, partner managers and integration engineers.

Building or optimizing the digital foundation to unleash the potential of innovation ecosystems.

Establishing pertinent KPIs to gauge the success of digital ecosystems.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Innovation Ecosystems Are the Right Way to Innovate in a Downturn

A Visual Guide to Digital Ecosystems

Case Study: Ecosystem Modeling Workshops to Develop Partnerships (Standard Bank Group)

Case Study: Managing Partners in Digital Ecosystems to Accelerate Digital Transformation

(DATEV)
Innovation Centers of Excellence
Analysis By: Tsuneo Fujiwara, Gunjita Mundeja

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

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Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:

Innovation centers of excellence (COEs) are an approach to provide structure, centralized

knowledge and dedicated resources to innovation management. They are capability centers run
by groups of experts establishing best practices, training and leadership around critical processes,
technologies and applications that support the innovation process.

Why This Is Important

Innovation COEs are essentially internal consultancies that support various types of innovation
within organizations. They are important because they:

Help capture, retain and share knowledge, spreading expertise to more areas of the business

Teach innovation techniques and guide innovative ideas

Help scale up and measure the value of innovation projects

Collect best practices and propagate a common approach to innovation across distributed
activities

Provide a pathway to communicate and collaborate outside hierarchical structures

Business Impact

Innovation COEs bring benefits, as they:

Ensure efficient use of resources to facilitate innovation projects via standard approaches

Create operational and financial efficiencies through strategic collaboration

Reduce operations costs by eliminating inefficiencies

Upskill innovation talent and support individual/team training on the latest innovation
techniques

Provide a focal point and information repository for innovations across the organization

Leverage expertise in innovation models, methods and methodologies from across the
organization

Drivers

An innovation COE is usually a lightweight approach that does not mandate its use, but rather
highlights its capabilities to support independent innovation efforts. Acting as a hub for
innovation, it can gather information about otherwise disconnected efforts across an
organization.

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An innovation COE provides a flexible structure. Many ways of bringing people together to
support or facilitate innovation are possible, including creating a dedicated innovation lab.
However, an innovation COE can be a more ad hoc, formal structure, or a dedicated and/or
virtual team that can evolve into, or complement, a more formalized innovation lab.

A COE supports knowledge sharing for innovation projects. Experts residing in the COE train
team members on viable innovation techniques and approaches.

Typically, teams within an organization find themselves working in silos as organizations get
more complex. In such cases, these teams work without sharing knowledge with one another,
despite the evolution of their skills. Innovation COEs can bridge these gaps.

A COE creates a structure through which members can measure, experiment and drive each
other toward excellence. Its sole purpose is to drive innovation and improvement across the
organization.

Companies implement COEs for several reasons, which revolve around implementing,
managing and using new technology, or adapting, managing, and using a specific or new
concept or skill.

COEs typically target specific instances within an organization. However, they’re worth
exploring in cases where the organization needs specific capabilities, specialized knowledge
and central oversight, such as innovation.

Similarly, a COE will help the organization where knowledge is difficult to acquire, or capability is
relatively homogeneous yet still important to the business.

Companies can use innovation COEs to research innovative products, services and business
models that align with their business strategies.

An innovation COE promotes a culture of innovation in the organization.

Obstacles

Complacency: Some companies adopt the attitude, “If it’s not broken, don’t try to fix it.” These
companies may be struggling with the status quo.

Complexity: Some companies don’t have the time, expertise or even the experience to
implement a COE.

Conservatism: Some companies take a conservative approach, believing they have a lot at
stake. They play the “wait-and-see game” before mitigating their risks.

Isolationism: Some COEs adopt an insular attitude of, “We are the experts — bring your issues
to us, and we’ll take over.” This exclusive mentality creates resentment.

Bureaucracy: COEs that focus only on the tactical mechanics of the process — academics such
as frameworks and methodologies — become bureaucratic and often fail.

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Lack of business focus: COEs that are too disconnected from the business lose focus.
Innovation COEs must track trends across technical and nontechnical areas and look for an
integrative approach.
User Recommendations

Create a COE as a focal point for promoting innovation broadly across the organization and for
sharing expertise in select innovation areas as needed.

Populate the COE team with leaders and experts in select innovation areas. These team
members can continue holding other positions or working in their roles part-time or full-time.

Specify the area of focus or capability of the innovation COE, which should align with the
business goals.

Define the purpose of the innovation COE, which can include providing research, training and
employee oversight; offering guidance; supporting the organization through best practices; and
governing resource allocation.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Infographic: Use Case Prism to Learn Go-To Techniques From the Innovation Heavyweights

Build Your Innovation Roadmaps Using a Customizable Framework

How to Build an Impactful Innovation Lab

Sliding into the Trough
Continuous Foresight
Analysis By: Marty Resnick, Frank Buytendijk

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Definition:

Continuous foresight leverages the best practices of strategic/corporate foresight and futurism to
continuously assess and evaluate business models and strategies, and determine how to adjust
either or both to create future success. Continuous foresight is a discipline for identifying and
assessing plausible futures using predictive, explorative and normative (backcasting) lenses.
Continuous foresight will help support the process of anticipating and influencing a world of
continual change.

Why This Is Important

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There is no doubt we are all living in a time of disruption and uncertainty. Organizations know that
there are many disruptions and trends that need to be responded to and — better yet —
anticipated. Organizations can use continuous foresight to connect the dots between acquiring
trends and turning those findings into action through innovation and strategic planning.
Business Impact

Taking a disciplined approach to continuous foresight will aid in guiding new strategies, business
and operating models, and responses to disruption. This leads to:

Hiring leaders that focus on, or encouraging existing leaders to use, continuous foresight.

A focus on world building, and scenario planning, as a means to anticipate plausible futures
with the goal of accelerating innovation today by understanding a plausible future world the
organization may be operating in.

IT and business leaders that highlight the impacts (accelerators and inhibitors) of forces, trends
and disruptions across technological, political, economic, social/cultural, trust/ethics,
regulatory/legal and environmental trends (what Gartner refers to as Tapestry), which achieves
more impactful strategic planning.

Drivers

IT leaders must make decisions, and increasingly, these decisions have to be made in complex
environments. They need to make key decisions and strategic choices that are impacted by:

The need to prepare for driving forces that actively impact, or may impact in the near future, the
strategic planning of the organization.

The need to remove the “noise” from all the distractions and information out there and
determine which signals and trends really are the ones that will offer new opportunities and/or
risks to the organization.

Creating a culture of ideation and innovation using continuous foresight as an input to the
process.

Communicating points of view of emerging trends (especially technology) prior to broad hype
and public discourse.

Utilizing scenario planning to test out and improve possible future strategic plans.

Fear of missing out (FOMO), while balancing the fear of messing up (FOMU) that most
organizations feel.

Desire to become future fit and antifragile in this age of persistent disruption in order to thrive.

Connecting the dots from all of the different trends, methodologies and ideas an organization is
exposed to in order to make sense of it all and make it applicable.

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Obstacles

Technology only focus: IT leaders tend to have a narrow focus on technology. Ignoring the
combinatorial impact of trends and disruptions with nontechnology trends could limit
innovation initiatives and create a lack of preparation for future challenges and opportunities.

No formal process: Many organizations performing continuous foresight and trendspotting do

not have a defined or formal process. Most use an ad hoc approach. This leads to a disjointed
effort that risks not taking full advantage of the positive impact a formal trendspotting
approach will have on overall strategic planning.

Not a technology trend: Leaders may continue to ignore or devalue nontechnology trends. This
will limit the adoption of continuous foresight and will result in gaps in the strategic planning
process because inputs are incomplete.
User Recommendations

Use four action sets — part of what we call the acquire, synthesize, advocate and prepare
(ASAP) model — providing a common methodology across the organization for tracking and
responding to disruptions.

Use trend cards to develop points of view for all trends that are applicable to the organization
now or in the near future.

Revive trendspotting efforts to assemble trends that will impact your technology strategy
decisions to prepare your organization to become future fit.

Adopt Tapestry analysis to identify relevant accelerators and inhibitors, including technological,
political, economic, social/cultural, trust/ethics, regulatory/legal and environmental factor
trends.

Begin using storytelling techniques (like sci-fi) to help stakeholders envisage the future.

Sample Vendors

FIBRES Online; Futures Platform; HYPE Innovation; ITONICS

Gartner Recommended Reading

Executive Essentials: Exploit Disruptive Trends With Trendspotting and Continuous Foresight

Preparing for a Future of Continuous Disruptions

Early Signals to Prepare for Future Disruptive Trends

The Top Trends and Forces Impacting Strategic Planning: Tapestry 2024

Future-Fit Organization Primer for 2024

Lean Startup
Analysis By: Arun Chandrasekaran, Ankita Khilare

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Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:

Lean startup is an innovation technique that accelerates the speed of product development and
enables rapid testing and alignment with the business model. Popularized by Eric Ries in the book
“The Lean Startup,” it is now successfully being adopted in the IT departments of large, mature
enterprises that seek to emulate the principles of intrapreneurship, validated learning, innovation
accounting and the build-measure-learn mindset.

Why This Is Important

Lean startup is a customer-centric, business validation approach to solving enterprise

uncertainties. It prioritizes experimentation, customer feedback and iterative design as core parts
of the innovation process to accelerate time to market. A lean startup approach can enable large
enterprises to enter new markets or product categories faster and compete better against
startups in their core product categories. The foundation of lean startup is a scientific and agile
way of decision making.

Business Impact

The business impacts of lean startup include:

Enhanced probability of successful innovation through an iterative and feedback-centric

approach to product development.

Dramatic impact on an organization’s culture and ability to innovate. Having successfully

implemented a lean startup mindset once, enterprises are likely to adopt it more broadly across
several business areas.

Significant scaling up of product experimentation and development when a lean team is

augmented with artificial intelligence and automation.

Reduction of uncertainty in a volatile environment, enabling large enterprises to respond faster

to changing circumstances.

Drivers

The build-measure-learn mindset, where product building is geared toward a minimum viable
product with immediate feedback from customers and iterative design, enables organizations
to constantly evolve in the right direction.

Lean startup provides an effective and low-risk space to try radical new ideas and technologies,
which are critical for organizations of all sizes to make audacious (but calculated) bets.

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Rapid prototyping and product build are critical to enable large enterprises to compete with
nimble startups.

Digital leaders want to experiment with new business models with lower risk, and in tune with
customer expectations and changing market dynamics.

To ensure the success of their digital business, IT leaders need to use data-driven decision
making and AI as core parts of the innovation value chain.

Enterprises are striving to validate the direction of their product at every step, as startups do.
This enables early “pivoting,” rather than requiring the organization to wait until the end when
change is too hard or too late.

The recent advancements in AI provide an algorithmic and machine-driven way to test,

accelerate and scale lean startups.
Obstacles

Lack of managers and employees who embody the lean startup mindset. While AI-driven
innovation can be a key accelerant, know-how around it is lacking.

Large enterprises often experience organizational inertia due to a strong culture favoring a
hierarchical organizational structure, sequential processes and preplanning of the entire
product development process. This goes against the core ethos of lean startups.

Heavy, rigid project governance can result in failure for lean startups. Emphasis should be on
adaptive governance.

Inflexibility and disagreement on business models can lead to lean startups being viewed as
cannibalistic to the enterprise’s core business. Lean startup success is not just about fast,
iterative product development, but is also predicated on pursuing creative business models.
Due to the innovator’s dilemma, these business models may often not be pursued.

Lean startups fail when decisions are made based on authority, and not data.

User Recommendations

Determine if the lean startup methodology is appropriate for you by analyzing your ability to
commercialize ideas and build competitive differentiation with the methodology.

Start small, with an innovative team on a pilot project that has limited complexity, and create an
early “moment of truth.”

Gain executive support and endorsement through practical demonstrations and educational
briefings.

Engage external experts to provide training and understanding of how lean startup
methodologies can be applied across the organization.

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Separate the project team from the core business so that it can truly pursue lean principles
without being encumbered by the business model or mindset of the wider organization.

Establish a clear timeline and metrics for success (such as adoption velocity, paid conversion
rate, repeat rate and value, and churn rate), but be willing to pivot or correct course based on
customer and market feedback.

Be objective about when, where and how to use AI to fuel your lean startup. Be mindful of
additional risks that AI can introduce relative to its benefits.
Gartner Recommended Reading

Enterprise Architects Combine Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile to Drive Digital
Innovation

Tool: Roadmap for Deploying and Managing Generative AI

Climbing the Slope
Trendspotting
Analysis By: Samantha Searle, Marty Resnick, Ankita Khilare, David Sugden

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:

Trendspotting is a purposeful and targeted approach for acquiring and evaluating trends. A trend
is an observation or prediction about current and future changes and disruptions that create
threats and opportunities. Trendspotting explores changes in technological, political, economic,
social/cultural, trust/ethics, regulatory/legal, and environmental areas and is used to inform and
enhance strategic planning, operational efficiency and innovation management.

Why This Is Important

Enterprises must continuously scan and respond to changes and disruptions that impact their
business. Trendspotting filters, analyzes, contextualizes and brings order to the cacophony of
observations and predictions about these changes, and is a critical technique for navigating
uncertainty and guiding scenario planning. Trendspotting establishes governance and
communication mechanisms for collaborating with constituencies inside and outside the
organization regarding trends.

Business Impact

Trendspotting helps organizational leaders:

Identify which trends and disruptions may have an impact on the business and how to respond
with changes to operations or strategy.

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Evaluate trends’ strategic relevance to drive more purposeful, outcome-driven innovation.

Anticipate the future and explore likely outcomes to provide decision makers with actionable
information for more prudent investments.
Drivers

Trendspotting is gaining greater use as a broader, structured and purposeful process as part of
strategic business, scenario and innovation planning. Gartner has seen an increase in the
number of technology innovation leaders, including CTOs and CIOs, looking to establish a
trendspotting capability as part of their organization.

Coordinated trendspotting is a more efficient and effective use of time and resources and
allows trends to be leveraged in many different organizational contexts.

The need to navigate uncertainty and guide scenario planning creates a greater need for
trendspotting.

Companies need to gather and qualify more information from diverse sources, and get it into
the hands of decision makers more quickly to support digital transformation and gain a
competitive edge.

Companies with a trendspotting capability are less likely to be blindsided by unexpected

disruptions.

Analyzing and contextualizing trend impact is an important part of risk analysis and mitigation.

Obstacles

Trendspotting is often an informal, ad hoc and niche activity, with little information sharing
between groups and no coordinated response.

Technology tracking can be mistaken for trendspotting. Technology tracking looks at the state
of a discrete technology, while a technology trend looks at a broader set of technologies
evolving over time.

Lack of detailed analysis of the factors driving and influencing a trend to determine when and
how to respond can lead to reactive decisions that do not drive long-term value.

Trendspotting that is not closely aligned with business impacts becomes academic and
undermines the effective allocation of resources.

User Recommendations

Develop methods to identify and contextualize trends using the “tapestry” that considers
technological, political, economic, social/cultural, trust/ethics, regulatory/legal and
environmental (TPESTRE, aka “TAPESTRY”) factors.

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Build a trendspotting charter to define the desired outcomes (e.g., inform, explore, advise),
metrics and scope of the effort to allocate adequate resources.

Exploit Gartner research, including Hype Cycles, trend lists and emerging technology impact
radars as the starting point for emerging technology trends, while leveraging TAPESTRY trend
cards for broader trendspotting.

Evaluate the impact of trends and determine response mechanisms for delivering forecasts,
perspectives, and insights to help leaders make informed investments using strategic foresight
and other methodologies.

Assess trends’ impact from the perspectives of people (customers, employees, partners), the
business (products, services, processes) and technology (IT departments, systems).

Utilize trend cards, radars, ideation tools, design thinking and other methods to collect, evaluate
and communicate information about trends.
Sample Vendors

Brightidea; EY; Futures Platform; HYPE Innovation; ITONICS; Planbox

Gartner Recommended Reading

The Gartner Framework to Organize and Execute Trendspotting

Getting Started With Trendspotting

Use Trendspotting to Identify the Trends That Matter and the Impact on Technology Adoption

Gain a Competitive Advantage by Looking for Trends Systematically

Tool: Developing Impactful Trend Cards

Innovation Culture Hacks
Analysis By: Tsuneo Fujiwara, Gunjita Mundeja, Darren Topham

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Adolescent

Definition:

An innovation culture hack is a small adjustment to an individual’s behavior that will create a
larger, more wide-ranging change in the culture of the organization. Innovation fosters a culture
that empowers innovators to be creative and curious.

Why This Is Important

An innovative culture is a must-have for digital business success. Culture hacks are quick ways to
impact the behaviors we do repeatedly in some specific, but positive, way. Hacking the culture

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means focusing on a single point where the culture is vulnerable to change, and altering it. The
best hacks create a culture where employees are empowered to innovate habitually.
Business Impact

Culture hacks make small behavioral adjustments that deliver big innovation benefits, which are
actionable, low effort (but not low courage), immediate, visible and emotional. Innovation culture
hacks should result in moving toward a culture where innovation is part of the organizational DNA
or “business as usual.” Innovation culture hacks could be a quick win to ensure innovators remain
motivated and continue to perform at their very best.

Drivers

Innovation culture hacks help the organization develop a culture of innovation by offering a
quick win, such as providing a common understanding that experimental failure is celebrated
equally with success as a means of learning.

Innovation culture hacks focus on a specific behavior that needs to change, and alter it.
Potential topics to explore include: How do we increase risk tolerance in our
team/organization? How do we increase the speed of our decision making and empowerment?
How do we properly recognize failure as essential?

As an example of culture hacking in innovation, if innovation failure is seen as undesirable,

embrace failure as a behavior to drive by displaying failed prototypes in the enterprise stories
with key learning that came from it on the company newsletter. This sends a signal that failure
in the pursuit of innovation is allowed, and what is learned matters regardless of the outcome.

A number of culture metrics can be set up and tracked to indicate how well the enterprise
culture might be progressing toward an innovative culture. These include the amount of
creative space given to individuals (time), individuals’ innovation inclination (interest), and team
incentives and empowerment. They also include employee turnover and employee satisfaction,
the level of predictability the organization is comfortable giving up (risk) and the ability of the
organization to change its ways in the name of innovation (experimentation, exploration and/or
learning). This ability to quantify culture drives culture hacking.

Obstacles

Culture is perceived as abstract and difficult to change, leaving many executive leaders to shy
away from trying. Generic statements like “we need our culture to be more innovative”
compound the problem because they lack specificity and bite.

If culture is defined as “the way we work,” it becomes more tangible. Then, the obstacle is to
find small alterations to how work is done.

Changing the culture involves recognizing that innovation is not always separate from day-to-
day operations. The leaders need to identify specific behavioral goals of a cultural change effort
in the current organizational context that shapes the choices.
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Since it tends to be a localized, grassroots initiative, culture hacking can lose momentum and
impact if executives and managers do not initiate and encourage an ongoing commitment.
User Recommendations

Identify behaviors that limit innovation and the confidence to experiment or explore new ways,
such as risk aversion. Create a safe environment for people to fail and learn from failures.

Build innovation credibility by targeting ongoing incremental innovation and short delivery time
frames.

Test if the organization is going where it was planned to go. That means not only identifying
best-case outcomes but also determining in advance what progress and success look like, and
what milestones the organization expects to see in day-to-day behaviors via setting and
tracking culture metrics.

Embrace multiple approaches to enable behavior change, including shifting mindset and
metrics, training on innovation techniques and approaches, and organizing activities to
generate and progress ideas. Enable them via designing and executing innovation culture
hacks.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Foster a Culture of Innovation Using a Two-Layered Roadmap

The Culture Hacking Roadmap

The Art of Culture Hacking

Innovation Is Not Just About Process, but Enabling Right Behaviors to Drive Ideas Into Action

5 Steps to Change the Culture of Your Organization

Innovation Labs
Analysis By: Gunjita Mundeja, Samantha Searle, Peter Skyttegaard, Tsuneo Fujiwara

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Mature mainstream

Definition:

An innovation lab is a unit whose mission is to devise novel ideas for disrupting or complementing
the rest of the organization and delivering business value and outcomes. It offers an independent
risk-tolerant environment that is not subject to typical business pressures and metrics and is
aligned with business strategy.

Why This Is Important

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Innovation labs can accelerate innovation by incubating promising ideas and freeing them from
the pressure of meeting short-term operational goals. Innovation labs identify ideas, experiment
on emerging technologies and demonstrate proofs of concept to various audiences in the
organization. They may also be a focal point to develop external partnerships, train employees on
innovation topics, collaborate with startups or incubators, and showcase innovative solutions to
visitors.
Business Impact

Innovation labs can contribute substantial business value by streamlining the process from idea
generation to value creation. A lab can target anything, ranging from radically enhancing existing
products, creating new products and entering a new market, to improving culture and employee
engagement. Labs provide a risk-tolerant environment to try new things by experimenting in an
environment to manage risk across a portfolio of opportunities.

Drivers

Innovation labs provide a specific space and time to explore initiatives independently from
existing ways of working or the dominant organizational culture. They help organizations take
risks that require some degree of separation from established organizational structures, such
as innovating business models or pursuing radically innovative products and services.

Innovation labs offer a safe and secure environment that allows exploration and
experimentation with emerging technologies that do not fit the security policies of the rest of
the organization.

Innovation labs enable experimenting with unconventional ideas by collaborating with startups,
universities, venture capitalists, incubators and talent, and by creating a startup culture that is
agile and focused on open communication, experimenting and problem solving.

Innovation labs play a pivotal role in discovering new opportunities and ways to generate
business success and strategizing for the future to survive and thrive through disruptions.

Obstacles

Innovation labs may not be focused on strategic business outcomes. So they struggle to obtain
executive buy-in due to unclear justification for the investment, eventually failing because they
are unable to prove business value.

Organizations may resist change and innovations, making it challenging to implement an

innovation lab.

Innovators may fail to advance deliverables from the lab to operations due to not informing and
involving the business and IT stakeholders who are responsible for implementations.

Innovation labs may not evolve over time and lag changes in business and industry, ending up
irrelevant and “ivory tower.”

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User Recommendations

Derive your innovation goals from the corporate strategy, and specify a structure that is
defensible and justifies the investment in an innovation lab.

Secure executive sponsorship that should help in developing business-focused metrics to track
innovation success.

Set a crystal-clear vision for the innovation lab by defining detailed, quantified, time-bound
goals that lead to the desired business outcomes.

Design an impactful innovation lab by creating a structured innovation operating model to guide
decision-making activities for innovation investments.

Create an operating model for the innovation lab, based on the innovation goals and planned
innovation activities. If the innovation lab spans a variety of activities, a modular approach can
serve a subsequent spinoff unit.
Gartner Recommended Reading

How to Build an Impactful Innovation Lab

You Need a Frictionless Operating Model to Run Your Innovation Lab Effectively

Quick Answer: Why Do Sandbox Innovation Labs Fail?

Emerging Technology Radars
Analysis By: Marty Resnick, Samantha Searle, Ankita Khilare

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience

Maturity: Adolescent

Definition:

An emerging technology radar is a customizable visualization that shows when emerging

technology trends are expected to impact and potentially disrupt the enterprise. Radars often
show additional information, such as the degree of impact, level of disruption or risks. It can be
used to track and prioritize discrete technologies in addition to broad technology trends. Radars
can be organized in a number of ways (called “zones”), including theme, technology domain,
business unit or department.

Why This Is Important

Emerging technology trends can drive shifts in a company’s strategy or form the basis for entirely
new strategies or business models. Emerging technology radars help an organization prioritize
investments by showing which technologies and trends are important and when they should be
acted on. It is a benefit-driven approach to technology adoption. Radars can save organizations
time and reduce risks of misunderstood technologies to ultimately support business
transformation efforts.
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Business Impact

Emerging technology trends can:

Cause disruption, pose risks and/or create opportunities for the organization

Raise awareness of which technologies and trends will have an impact on the business

Visualize, assess, share and discuss the relative impact of trends and technologies

Encourage leaders to focus on items that will have a high impact on their industry and
company, and that are mature enough to align with their risk tolerance for adoption.

Drivers

Radars are easily digestible visualization tools for planning and decision making to help leaders
make decisions about how and when to act for technology adoption.

They can be used to simplify, inform and explain an otherwise complex analysis of technology
and trend opportunities, risks and impact across multiple business units.

Radars provide a useful model to consider the timing of opportunities, challenges and
disruptions of future trends in the business, as well as the level of uncertainty with each trend.

Emerging technology radars can be used to provide unbiased recommendations based on a

fact-based analysis method.

A collection of trend radars focused on individual business units or different categories of

trends (e.g., technology trends versus economic trends) can be used to drive specific
discussions with business executives.

Emerging technology radars are an ongoing way to keep an eye on technology and separate the
hype from reality as it pertains to the potential impact that a technology (or combination of
technologies) may have on the business.

Obstacles

Lack of a fact-based analysis method can lead to inappropriate and uninformed decision
making.

A belief that the radar is a final and definitive conclusion about a trend, when it’s actually a
reasoned opinion used to discuss options, leads to misaligned expectations.

The proliferation of radars for multiple technology and nontechnology trends can itself become
complex. Understanding how to properly bound the project and organize the radars is
important.

Radars are a visual view of technologies and trends, and the use of various symbols, symbol
size and alphanumeric indicators can provide a useful reference. However, if left unchecked,
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complexity can obscure the message you are trying to deliver.

Radars are generally considered an annual deliverable, but if not updated more regularly,
disruptive technologies may be missed.
User Recommendations

Use emerging technology radars as a critical step in the trendspotting process to communicate
how digital disruptions introduce risk and opportunity in the organization.

Treat radars as living documents that should be continuously updated with the latest
trendspotting information.

Scan the market for candidate technology trends, and provide a process to vet and eliminate
those that don’t have beneficial returns for the company, while tracking those technologies that
do.

Focus on trends that are most relevant to your business strategy. Thus, every company will
have its own version of the radar screen.

Use different radars to drive different conversations with business leaders, and guide those
conversations to focus on how disruptive trends will impact the organization.

Showcase radars in meetings with your business stakeholders to align your organization and
drive actions that deliver positive business outcomes.

Use technology radars, in combination with emerging technology wheels, to drive technology
innovation.

Sample Vendors

FIBRES; Futures Platform; ITONICS; TRENDONE

Gartner Recommended Reading

Tool: Developing Impactful Trend Cards

Tool: How to Build an Emerging Technology Radar

The Gartner Framework to Organize and Execute Trendspotting

Idea Management Tools
Analysis By: Nikos Drakos

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:

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Idea management tools help organizations manage the flow of ideas from initial concept
generation to final value realization or commercial exploitation. They support diverse methods to
generate ideas — both internally and externally — to prioritize and select ideas, to act on selected
ideas, to observe and measure activity and impact, and to operate innovation programs at scale.
Why This Is Important

The ability to innovate is a fundamental characteristic of any successful organization in a

competitive market. Whether an innovation initiative is focused on internal efficiency, partner
effectiveness, product differentiation or customer intimacy, every win depends on having ideas
recognized, selected and executed effectively. While it is not necessary to use technology to
generate or execute ideas, idea management tools help scale and focus idea generation, selection
and execution.

Business Impact

Idea management tools support many aspects of the innovation process:

Idea generation through trendspotting, events, campaigns and hackathons

Consolidation, connection and integration of ideas from different groups and jurisdictions

Collaboration to collect, refine and filter ideas

Stage-gate workflow automation to support structured decision making based on cost, risk and
business impact

Idea execution via project or product management capabilities

Analysis and reporting via status updates and aggregated project or portfolio views for
different stakeholders

Drivers

Idea management tools make it easier to crowdsource ideas from internal employees as well
as from customers and other external stakeholders. They support trendspotting, brainstorming,
and broader activities including idea jams, events, challenges and continuous engagement.

Idea management tools offer support for end-to-end innovation activities. They provide not only
idea generation capabilities but also self-service and generative AI (GenAI)-supported
mechanisms for filtering, organizing and systematically assessing the risks and rewards of
different options. They also help maintain a portfolio of active options.

Some vendors are broadening support for use cases such as roadmapping, IP
commercialization and agile experimentation.

Idea management tools often come with advice on and support for effective use.

In some cases, idea management tools offer access to external ecosystems, including
specialists in different areas. This phenomenon is sometimes described as “software that
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comes with people.”

The interoperability of idea management tools with other strategic platforms is increasing,
including interoperability with cloud office or project management tools. Some idea
management tools are even offered as add-ons to cloud office suites, such as Microsoft 365.
Obstacles

Lack of preparedness: Some organizations are not ready to use idea management tools
effectively. The success of this technology depends on organizations’ readiness to move ideas
into execution and value realization. Readiness means having budgets and decision-making
authority in place when needed.

Lack of participation: Idea generation tools rely on discretionary participation, which requires
participant motivation. Ideation initiatives can fail if not enough attention is paid to motivating
participation and, more generally, driving a culture of innovation.

Technology overlap: The collaboration, stage-gate automation, reporting and execution

components of idea management tools overlap with cloud office suites and other applications
that may already be in place. Despite increasingly sophisticated integration options, this
technology overlap introduces extra complexity in terms of user experience and IT
infrastructure management. It also makes it more difficult to establish clear differentiation
between innovation and more general-purpose products, which is one of the drivers for
increased market consolidation activity in the last year.

User Recommendations

Ensure commitment (including leadership buy-in), budgets and decision responsibilities are in
place by engaging with business stakeholders and establishing an innovation framework,
whether or not a tool is deployed. Tools can help with scaling and optimizing the effort, but will
be ineffective without having the fundamentals in place.

Select idea management tools based on vendor and product capabilities. Focus on usability
and user engagement through gamification, and on supporting decision makers in defining
selection criteria and the process for moving ideas through to value realization.

Focus ideation on desired outcomes. Choose relevant idea generation scenarios (e.g., events,
challenges and campaigns) to identify participants, decision makers, engagement
mechanisms, evaluation criteria and execution methods. Clearly communicate the value of
participation to your target audience.

Deploy innovation management tools alongside applications already in use to ensure

participants are immersed in the business context that can spark new ideas. Examples include
collaboration or business applications such as Microsoft Teams, Slack from Salesforce, and
Workplace from Meta.

Sample Vendors

Brightidea; edison365; HYPE Innovation; IdeaScale; ITONICS; Qmarkets; Vianeo; Wazoku

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Gartner Recommended Reading

Market Guide for Innovation Management Tools

Voice of the Customer for Innovation Management Tools

Organizing for Innovation: Maturing From Accidental to Intentional Innovation

Infographic: Use Case Prism to Learn Go-To Techniques From the Innovation Heavyweights

Use Generative AI in Applied Innovation to Drive Business Value

Open Innovation
Analysis By: Peter Skyttegaard, Gunjita Mundeja

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Mature mainstream

Definition:

Open innovation is an approach that sources ideas from outside the organization and also shares
unused or underutilized ideas from within the organization to customers and external partners. It
has become an essential component of many corporate innovation programs. It was first
proposed by Henry Chesbrough, professor and executive director at the Center for Open
Innovation at UC Berkeley, in his 2003 book “Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating
and Profiting from Technology.”

Why This Is Important

In a world of abundant knowledge and instant information mobility, companies cannot rely on the
notion that enough innovative people work for them, and that good ideas and perspectives only
come from within. Nor should they assume that they possess the resources to exploit all their
ideas internally. Innovation today must go beyond the boundaries of the individual organization so
that talent and inspiration can be leveraged more widely.

Business Impact

By sharing inventions and ideas across partnerships, open innovation allows organizations to
bring underutilized ideas to value elsewhere, and to solicit ideas from external sources, such as
suppliers, customers, universities, startups and even competitors. Ideas can be exchanged
through selling, buying and licensing technology and patents, but open innovation can also involve
“like for like” exchanges or “free” transactions, where the value comes from peer recognition or
brand publicity.

Drivers

Companies are facing an increase in the complexity and size of challenges that they seek to
solve through innovation. Contributing significantly to solutions for environmental or societal
issues is beyond the reach of (most) individual enterprises, so companies come together to
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address these issues. Combining capabilities can provide mutual benefits to all parties involved
and allow better sharing of risk.
There is a growth of business ecosystems as a dominant model within many industries. As
these ecosystems bring diverse participants together — including startups, academia and
technology providers — they enable open exchange of innovative ideas.

Open innovation is a great early litmus test for ideas in an open, not-controlled environment.

Technology platforms can provide more visibility in nonmonetary recognition, similar to getting
“likes” on social media. An example is the LEGO Ideas platform, where fan designers can
submit ideas for new designs and can get their ideas promoted and, eventually, turned into real
products if they win support from other community members.

Knowledge is increasingly mobile. Technology provides inexpensive and instant sharing of

information globally. It also allows greater mobility of individual workers. The increase in
remote work or hybrid work in recent years has made it easier for workers to work remotely for
companies at greater distance. It also makes it easier for companies to source knowledge from
workers far away.

“Sharing is caring.” There is a general societal shift toward seeing sharing as a positive trait.
This behavior shift is heavily influenced by consumers moving to sharing economies. Tesla’s
decision to open-source its patent portfolio is a good business example.
Obstacles

Concerns over losing competitive advantage when revealing intellectual property to potential
competitors

Risk of infringement of intellectual property rights when sourcing ideas from external sources

Difficulties with incentivizing participants in nonmonetary innovation exchanges

“Not invented here” syndrome — the tendency to resist ideas or knowledge stemming from
outside sources, often found in established corporate cultures

User Recommendations

Liberate internal expertise by identifying innovative ideas that you are currently not using.
Decide which ideas you are willing to share freely and which you will seek to monetize.

Pursue multiple options by selecting from a range of approaches, from free exchange to
monetary transactions, in both inbound and outbound knowledge exchange.

Make open innovation a part of your culture by identifying macrolevel challenges that your
employees are encouraged to contribute to solving.

Promote the use of generative AI in the scouting, comparing and sourcing of innovation ideas
to aid the processing of a wider range of ideas.

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Expand your source of innovative ideas by inviting a range of external stakeholders to

contribute ideas to solve current business challenges.

Promote a shift in leadership mindset toward sharing by actively promoting good examples of
mutual benefits from shared capabilities or knowledge.
Gartner Recommended Reading

Accelerate Innovation Pace With an Adaptive Innovation Ecosystem Framework

(Adaptive) Innovation Governance
Analysis By: Tsuneo Fujiwara, Darren Topham, Gunjita Mundeja

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience

Maturity: Mature mainstream

Definition:

Innovation governance is a set of mechanisms that aligns goals, assigns decision authority and
allocates resources to innovation activities with the aim of creating optimal value potential at
acceptable risk. Governance plays a key role in the decision making of the start-stop innovation
idea, which would also decide the future journey of the innovation initiative. For innovation,
governance needs to be adaptive due to the experimental nature of innovation.

Why This Is Important

Organizations that are unable to establish the appropriate innovation governance mechanisms
early are more at risk of their innovation efforts floundering due to a lack of agility and the ability
to explore and achieve a timely and successful outcome. Moreover, there has been a push toward
a more democratized delivery of innovation, meaning business and IT are co-leading and co-
delivering innovation, prompting co-governing.

Business Impact

Innovation needs governance beyond traditional guardrails and expected returns. The innovators
need to be allowed to accomplish what they need to do, but there must be restrictions in place to
catch any derailments and preserve the enterprise’s larger needs and red lines. Innovation
governance should enable faster decision making, learning from failure and changing the culture
to one of experimentation, based on the innovation life cycle stage. Therefore, innovation requires
a system for adaptive governance.

Drivers

Innovation governance starts with a set of boundaries and parameters that allow for adaptation
based on objectives and context.

Establishment of innovation governance occurs in response to the enablement of agility and

flexibility, and as the innovation maturity level of the enterprise increases. It is not intended to

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control progress, manage change in scope or closely track budget vs. actual in seed money
spending.
Adaptive innovation governance helps innovators do what they need to do while ensuring
derailments are caught in sufficient time to take corrective actions.

Adaptive innovation governance is an iterative approach that considers the needs of the
organization and the innovators.

Adaptive governance offers flexibility throughout the innovation life cycle, between the highly
controlled governance needs and the more autonomous and agile requirements, so that the
innovation team can function effectively.
Obstacles

Innovation governance can be a tricky balance between when to apply strong governance and
when to leave more autonomous governance in play. Inappropriate, weak or uncoordinated
governance usually leads to highly variable levels of outcomes and risks.

Leaders often find it challenging to apply governance frameworks that properly balance risk and
reward in innovation. Governance that is too relaxed — or no governance at all — can lead to
wasted resources or unacceptable risk, whereas governance that is too tight can slow down
and stifle innovation efforts and lead to forfeiting business opportunities.

User Recommendations

Determine the governance needs over the innovation life cycle for both the enterprise (usually
more controlled) and the innovation team (usually more autonomous) based on the scope of
work and the innovation maturity level of the organization.

Specify the appropriate governance mechanisms (rules, roles, processes, structures and
behaviors) that will address these needs and apply them with the right strengths as needed.

Look for shifts in both enterprise and innovation requirements that could trigger the need to
review and adjust, or adapt, the mix and nature of governance mechanisms used.
Communicate these adjustments effectively when they occur.

Gartner Recommended Reading

The CIO’s Guide to Innovation Governance

Design Sprints
Analysis By: Will Grant, Brent Stewart

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:
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A design sprint is a multiday, workshop-style process designed to solve business problems

through strategic design exploration, prototyping and rapid user testing. A typical design sprint
lasts five days and includes steps to define the business problem, generate ideas, prototype the
solution and test the prototype with end users. Design sprints help developers and designers to
work better together by providing a structured process for collaboration.
Why This Is Important

Design sprints enable the rapid generation and evaluation of big ideas, and using quick
prototyping and fast feedback helps maintain focus on delivering customer value. Teams working
together through design sprints generate new ideas, revolutionary features and products, or
identify new ways to solve old problems. By employing design sprints, an organization taps its
collective knowledge from across the business to gain deeper insight from cross-disciplinary
subject matter experts.

Business Impact

Design sprints foster innovation. By quickly creating and testing prototypes, businesses can
validate ideas and assumptions before investing in development, saving time and money, and
increasing the chances of success in the market. Design sprints can drastically reduce the
resources spent on developing a product or service while still maintaining their ability to
incrementally evolve and maintain core products and services, and can do so faster than the
average product team.

Drivers

Design sprints are driving:

Deeper relationships: Collaborative creativity builds bridges between people, teams and across
disciplines. The collaborative nature of design sprints can improve team cohesion, leading to
better productivity and creativity. Most critically, design sprints open channels of
communication and build relationships that close the gap between design and development,
leading to better ideas, easier execution, superior design and higher-quality releases.

Cultural Impact: Design sprints have a significant cultural impact on an organization. During a
design sprint, ideas rule the day, not people, and this democratization of influence is
empowering to individuals who may not always have a voice at the table of product strategy
and innovation.

User centricity: By bringing the whole team — not just designers — along for the journey, design
sprints have the effect of instilling a user-centric mindset in nondesign staff. Developers,
salespeople, customer support and business leaders are operating in a “user first” mode for the
whole design sprint, with lasting impact on how they see the process of ideation.

Obstacles

Workshop skills: Successful design sprints must be planned and run with precision and finesse,
but only experienced workshop planners and facilitators can do the planning, preparation and
ongoing production work.
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Availability: A sprint is worthless unless you have the right attendees — both from the user
experience (UX) team and the business. For the average product team, it is difficult to lose key
team members from product delivery tracks of work for an entire week or more.

Echo chambers: The best feedback comes from users of the product. If it’s not possible to
present to users during (or at the end of) a design sprint, be cautious about feedback from the
same set of internal stakeholders. Managers are a poor proxy for users.

Expectations: Design sprints are great to initiate action on a new initiative, but don’t offer
definitive answers or deep solutions. Their focus is on getting started and where to go next,
rather than on finished products.
User Recommendations

Educate software engineering leaders and their teams in the practice of design sprints, and
incorporate design sprints into your delivery process by experimenting with larger-scale
strategic initiatives, new product concepts and transformative feature enhancements.

Recognize that design sprints are overkill for smaller, incremental improvements.

Employ process, activity and deliverable templates from visual collaboration tools (e.g., FigJam,
Miro, Mural) to improve the quality of design sprint sessions.

Create dedicated advocates within the organization to promote the value of design sprints and
lead their implementation.

Start small, with low-risk sprints to demonstrate the effectiveness, and iterate to build
confidence.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Quick Answer: How Can We Incorporate User-Centric Design Into the Features We Build for Our
Product?

Quick Answer: How to Build a User Experience Team Business Case

How to Measure the Value of User Experience Design

Market Guide for User Research Platforms

The 4 Secrets of Design-Led Companies

Visual Collaboration Applications
Analysis By: Brent Stewart

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience

Maturity: Mature mainstream

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Definition:

Visual collaboration applications are cloud-based tools that enable teams to communicate and
collaborate creatively, both asynchronously and in real time. These applications provide a shared
digital canvas offering collaboration features and templates for common frameworks, flows,
activities and designs.
Why This Is Important

Visual collaboration applications have solidified their position as a critical tool for teams
delivering digital products and services. Teams use these platforms to collaboratively generate
and evaluate insights, ideas, strategies and designs, regardless of physical location. For digital
product teams, these platforms serve as the shared canvas for user experience (UX) design,
product and engineering teams, enabling a synergy that fosters the creation of leading-edge
solutions and increases quality.

Business Impact

Visual collaboration applications have improved the way teams engage in creative work, enabling
both remote and hybrid models to thrive. These tools enhance creativity, streamline project and
product management, and improve team engagement across geographical boundaries. Visual
collaboration applications support real-time collaboration, idea sharing and feedback, leading to
faster decision making and more innovative solutions.

Drivers

Product team collaboration: Visual collaboration applications streamline workflows between

different segments of product teams — from management to design and development. By
reducing the need for sequential handovers, they ensure a more aligned and cohesive product
development process, enhancing overall product quality.

Design thinking and collaborative creativity: Visual collaboration tools provide an ideal
environment for workshops, design sprints and strategy sessions. Teams can share ideas,
evaluate options and make decisions collectively.

Templates for accelerated workflow: With an array of templates for various strategies and
techniques, these tools significantly accelerate the process of discovery, exploration and
validation.

Integration with other tools: The ability to integrate with popular product management, UX
design and software engineering tools eliminates the friction of switching between
applications, creating a seamless workflow.

Generative AI’s role: As generative AI takes on more of the production workload, from designing
screens to generating code, the focus of human creativity is shifting toward more strategic and
research-oriented activities. Visual collaboration applications are becoming the central hub for
human creativity, facilitating a space where imaginative and strategic aspects of projects
flourish.

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Accessibility and inclusivity: By providing a platform that is accessible to team members with
various abilities and from different backgrounds, visual collaboration tools ensure that everyone
can contribute to their fullest potential. This inclusivity enriches the creative process and leads
to more diverse and innovative outcomes.

Documentation and traceability: These applications offer comprehensive documentation and

change-tracking capabilities. This ensures clear records of ideas and decisions, making it
easier to track the evolution of a project and onboard new team members.
Obstacles

Perceived as remote-only: There’s a risk that these applications are seen as tools for remote or
hybrid teams, potentially limiting their use.

Integrated platform competition: Platforms that combine design, collaboration and

communication features offer similar functionalities. This integration can make stand-alone
visual collaboration tools seem less appealing or redundant.

User learning curve: New users may find the learning curve of these applications complex,
overwhelming or unfamiliar, potentially deterring adoption.

Cost: The expense of subscriptions can be a significant barrier, especially for smaller
businesses or teams with limited budgets. Cost-effective or free alternatives could outshine
paid platforms.

Data security, privacy and portability: Data breaches compromising customer data, intellectual
property or sensitive strategies can damage trust and user adoption. Moreover, the lack of
portability standards raises concerns about platform migration and vendor lock-in.

User Recommendations

Establish a knowledge sharing standard: Adopt the chosen visual collaboration tool as the
primary medium for disseminating product and design knowledge among team members.
Utilize the platform for conducting workshops and design sprints, facilitating both remote and
in-person collaboration.

Leverage for user research: Use the application for planning and conducting user research
sessions that benefit from real-time interaction and facilitation.

Facilitate cross-departmental collaboration: Encourage departments beyond product

development, such as marketing and sales to use the application for cross-functional
collaboration.

Invest in training and support: Offer comprehensive training sessions and continuous support
to ensure all users feel comfortable and proficient with the application.

Promote a culture of collaboration: Make the visual collaboration application a cornerstone of

fostering a culture of openness and teamwork.

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Sample Vendors

Bluescape; Figma; Klaxoon; Lucid Software; Miro; Tactivos (Mural)

Design Thinking
Analysis By: Brian Prentice

Benefit Rating: High

Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience

Maturity: Mature mainstream

Definition:

Design thinking is an ideation methodology extracted from the broader, multidisciplinary design
process used in the creation of physical and digital products.

Why This Is Important

Design thinking within innovation management is an ideation methodology extracted from the
broader, multidisciplinary design process, and is generally delivered through a workshop format. It
promotes investment in empathetic learning about the organization’s customers/stakeholders as
the key step to ensure the right problems are defined before innovative actions are taken to deliver
solutions. It ensures a human-centered approach, and works to minimize uncertainty and risk in
innovation efforts.

Business Impact

Design thinking directs the focus of innovation teams toward the human aspects of any given
challenge or opportunity. It helps business innovators explore multiple solutions and incorporate
different perspectives throughout the innovation effort. It is particularly useful in tackling what are
known as “wicked” problems — issues that are difficult to solve because of incomplete,
contradictory and changing factors that are not easily recognized.

Drivers

People centricity: Design thinking starts with people. It’s oriented to see an organization’s
business process through the lens of its stakeholders, rather than seeing these stakeholders as
nodes in a process diagram or users of technology. This simple reorientation in perspective
leads to dramatically different insights and applies to both customer-facing and internal
operational innovations.

Diversity of perspective: The quality of output from design thinking increases in line with the
diversity of the people participating in the effort. Different perspectives add significant value in
interpreting people-centric data and drawing accurate conclusions.

Outside-in orientation: Design thinking, if done properly, forces participants to look beyond the
obvious spans of control or attention. It helps an organization see how it fits within the broader

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context of its customers’ goals or see the organization’s operations through the eyes of people
at the front line.

Integration with design practices: Design thinking isn’t contingent on making a new product or
service. However, when it is used for that, there is seamless integration into a broader design
process.

Workshop-led: Most design thinking occurs through workshops run by design team members
who understand the connection between design thinking as an ideation methodology and
design as a process of producing products and services to solve problems for people.
Obstacles

Cutting corners on research: Design thinking is a process of applying unique analysis

techniques to data coming from usage reports and, more importantly, observational research.
This data can be time-consuming and expensive to produce.

Poor planning: Often, workshops proceed without any research and quickly devolve into
empathy sessions. Resulting personas and journey maps are more likely to echo existing
biases than create an accurate picture of reality that is needed to drive innovation.

Design confusion: A common pitfall is to conflate design thinking with the design process.
Design thinking, then, ends up as a training program instead of a repeatable ideation technique.
The hope is that running staff through a couple of days in a design thinking workshop will mean
no incremental investments are needed to build internal design capability or to retain design
agencies. The end result is design thinking workshops that have neither any follow-through
activity nor any hope for design capability.

User Recommendations

Direct design thinking toward clearly articulated business problems where stakeholders can be
identified and business value can be measured. Complex, “wicked” problems are fine; however,
without proper grounding, design thinking can result in very creative insights that are
unactionable.

Don’t skip observational, “empathetic” research — ensure research work precedes any design
thinking initiative.

Establish high diversity among design thinking participants for robust resulting insights.

Leverage the investments in internal design talent to establish an ongoing program of applied
design thinking and to ensure qualified designers are leading design thinking workshops.

Where possible, link design thinking workshops to broader design initiatives in order to increase
the chances of ideation moving into an actual production process.

Gartner Recommended Reading

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Use Design Thinking to Boost the Agility of Strategic Planning

CDAOs Should Adapt Design Thinking to Drive Better Business Decision Making
Entering the Plateau
Hackathons
Analysis By: Gunjita Mundeja, David Pidsley

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Definition:

Hackathons are a competitive design activity that involves developing a prototype or app, usually
in one to two days. Assigned or self-selected teams work in parallel on a goal or challenge, and
come together at a fun final event to pitch and compete against each other. Hackathons can
involve internal participants (employees) or external participants (universities, startups, citizens).
Outside IT, these are used to rapidly prototype plans, products/services and customer/employee
experiences.

Why This Is Important

Hackathons allow a shift toward more customer-centric innovation through collaborative

development that can be more inclusive, diverse and representative of employees, customers and
other stakeholder communities. With the explosion of mobile apps and AI-powered customer
experiences, hackathons provide co-production opportunities. Hackathons showcase lean and
agile methods that reduce time to market in an uncertain business environment, encouraging new
ways of working on the most innovative solutions.

Business Impact

Hackathons (aka hack days, hackfests, datathons or codefests) benefit organizations by

generating ideas, prototypes and user feedback in a single event. They’re popular in the public
sector, healthcare, education, banking, energy, media, gaming and sports. Hackathons are made
successful with the help of public relations teams, by leveraging conference halls, platforms with
APIs, software development kits (SDKs), frameworks, data and compute. This technique can be
used across business to generate innovation ideas.

Drivers

Hackathons enable organizations to identify new revenue opportunities or proposals, product

or service ideas, or “what-ifs” and business models to generate/retain clients or support other
existing KPIs.

The speed and agility of hackathons provide a strongly time-constrained environment that not
only fosters rapid ideation, but minimizes the resources needed to do so.

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Corporatewide hackathons foster collaboration and cross-functional thinking. They also

improve results by adding diverse viewpoints. In short, they break down silos for long-lasting
effect.

By encouraging innovative thinking to solve well-known problems or speed up slow business

processes, hackathons change corporate culture. At the same time, they help users learn about
the constraints of existing systems.

Hackathons can not only identify suboptimal customer/employee experiences, but also
improve them, especially via the development of applications and multiexperience interfaces.

Hackathons can help attract, identify, evaluate and retain talent, especially scarce and highly
skilled developers/engineers, data scientists, creatives, entrepreneurs, industry vertical experts
and business domain experts.

Enterprises can use hackathons to engage new partners and build communities and vendor
ecosystems with innovative startups.

Recent developments in low-code/no-code tools for rapid prototyping are fueling hackathons.
The rise of “citizen” skills decentralized to lines of business (e.g., citizen developers, citizen data
scientists and citizen integrators) is also having an impact.

Hackathons that target a cause or purpose, social impact or environmental protection, are
trending. “Data for Good” hackathons are an example.
Obstacles

Poor planning and stakeholder engagement can lead to low hackathon participation.

Ambiguity in event purpose, due to nonalignment with business problems, can hinder
participation.

Virtual collaboration and communication tools constrain hackathon experiences and outcomes,
especially networking and unstructured interaction.

Innovation days, which are broader alternatives to hackathons and are used to manifest ideas
without data and technology resources.

Lack of coding abilities, poor data literacy and low digital literacy create a digital divide,
hindering noncoders’ contribution to hackathons. However, noncoders can contribute through
ideation, mockups, testing, documentation and storytelling.

Most hackathon deliverables require further development or get abandoned, creating a lack of
transparency in idea implementation or progress.

Compliance issues related to security, confidentiality and intellectual property rights must be
considered, adding complexity.

User Recommendations
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Scope your hackathons around a clear theme and specific objectives to ensure alignment with
strategic goals.

Plan logistics early and document lessons learned to address hybrid (virtual-physical)
challenges.

Generate interest and attract target participants by creating a marketing campaign and
highlighting attending experts and judges.

Set expectations at the kickoff by clearly communicating the theme, goals and judging criteria.

Ensure fairness by judging solutions objectively based on established criteria.

Use internal hackathons to comply with security, privacy and confidentiality policies when
necessary.

Transition prototypes into pilots through a product or relationship manager to ensure legal,
ethical, reliable, secure and compliant reuse.

Measure success by evaluating prototypes’ impact on goals, and incorporate lessons learned
into future hackathons for continuous improvement.
Sample Vendors

HackerEarth; Junction; Kaggle; Mercer; Mettl; Slack; TechGig

Gartner Recommended Reading

Innovation Idea Selection — Choosing for Success

Generate Innovation Ideas Through Activities, Education and Attitude

Case Study: Digital Technology Adoption Using Hackathons

Case Study: Forming a Developer Community to Advance Product- and Community-Led Growth
(Twilio)

Case Study: Enterprise Chatbot Strategy (FiveTrain*)

Appendixes
See the previous Hype Cycle: Hype Cycle for Innovation Practices, 2023.

Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels

Table 2: Hype Cycle Phases

Phase Definition

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Innovation A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event

Trigger generates significant media and industry interest.

Peak of Inflated During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of
Expectations well-publicized activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but
more failures, as the innovation is pushed to its limits. The only enterprises
making money are conference organizers and content publishers.

Trough of Because the innovation does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it
Disillusionment rapidly becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few
cautionary tales.

Slope of Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse

Enlightenment range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the innovation’s
applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and
tools ease the development process.

Plateau of The real-world benefits of the innovation are demonstrated and accepted.
Productivity Tools and methodologies are increasingly stable as they enter their second
and third generations. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable
with the reduced level of risk; the rapid growth phase of adoption begins.
Approximately 20% of the technology’s target audience has adopted or is
adopting the technology as it enters this phase.

Years to The time required for the innovation to reach the Plateau of Productivity.
Mainstream
Adoption

Source: Gartner (July 2024)

Table 3: Benefit Ratings

Benefit Rating Definition

Transformational Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in
major shifts in industry dynamics

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High Enables new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will
result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Moderate Provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result

in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Low Slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will
be difficult to translate into increased revenue or cost savings

Source: Gartner (July 2024)

Table 4: Maturity Levels

Maturity Levels Status Products/Vendors

Embryonic In labs None

Emerging Commercialization by vendors First generation

Pilots and deployments by industry leaders High price

Much customization

Adolescent Maturing technology capabilities and Second generation

process understanding
Less customization
Uptake beyond early adopters

Early Proven technology Third generation

mainstream
Vendors, technology and adoption rapidly More out-of-box
evolving methodologies

Mature Robust technology Several dominant vendors

mainstream
Not much evolution in vendors or
technology

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Legacy Not appropriate for new developments Maintenance revenue

focus
Cost of migration constrains replacement

Obsolete Rarely used Used/resale market only

Source: Gartner (July 2024)

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