Coaching practices for Innovation Frameworks

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Innovation Frameworks, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I have a cross-pollinated idea that might be brilliant or might be nonsense
  • I’ve been brainstorming this for hours and every idea is a slight variation on the same one
  • Almost everyone I talk to does roughly what I do, so we just keep recycling the same ideas back at each other
  • I’m trying to build the whole breakdown of this problem from a blank page, reinventing the structure from scratch, and it’s slow and I keep missing obvious pieces
  • Everyone I talk to does basically what I do and reads what I read, so my ideas just keep recycling the same stuff

Practices that may help

  1. The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
    Frans Johansson’s Medici Effect argues that the most original innovations occur at the "intersection" — where concepts from different disciplines, cultures, or domains collide and combine in unexpected ways. The framework is consistent with research on analogical reasoning and the value of diverse knowledge networks for creative output; the book itself is a practitioner synthesis rather than a research study.
  2. Run low-cost experiments on intersectional ideas
    Test cross-domain ideas quickly and cheaply before investing in them fully.
    The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
  3. Sample inventive principles to generate solution directions
    Apply one or more of TRIZ’s 40 inventive principles as generative lenses, even without the full contradiction matrix.
    TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions
  4. Build a diverse network deliberately
    Connect with people in different disciplines, cultures, and functions — not primarily with people who do what you do.
    The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
  5. Use proven MECE frameworks as starting structures
    Standard frameworks (profit tree, 4Ps, Porter’s Five Forces) are pre-built MECE structures — use them rather than rebuilding from scratch.
    Issue Tree Analysis
  6. Build a liquid network: expose yourself to people at the edge of different fields
    Seek out conversations and environments where ideas from adjacent fields are in the air — most good ideas are collisions, not inventions.
    The Adjacent Possible, Made Practical
  7. Intentional field-crossing
    Regularly study a field entirely outside your domain and ask what it could teach yours.
    The Medici Effect: Innovation at the Intersection
  8. Reason up from the parts, not by analogy
    Build the solution from the fundamentals you kept, rather than copying an existing template.
    First-Principles Thinking, Made Usable
  9. Use morphological analysis for wicked problems with many interdependencies
    The method shines on problems too complex for brainstorming to cover adequately.
    Morphological Analysis, Made Practical
  10. Calibrate whether the problem requires invention or just search
    Determine whether your problem is already solved elsewhere before investing in original invention.
    TRIZ: Systematic Invention and the Logic of Contradictions

Related concerns

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.

Practice this with IX Coach

Try this practice