How Ideas Find Structure
Most teams approach innovation as if it were one problem. It's actually three.
The first is knowing where to look. The second is whether the organisation can handle it. And the third is how to move an idea from a conversation into something real. Most efforts fail not because ideas are weak, but because they're trying to solve all three with the same approach.
What I've found useful is treating each as a separate question and matching a specific framework to each one.
The first question: where does innovation actually happen?
Most organisations default to product when they think about innovation. New features, new services, better performance. That's one place, but it's not the only one.
Doblin's 10 Types of Innovation maps ten different areas where meaningful change can occur, grouped into three clusters. The first is Configuration, which is about how the business works internally: the profit model, partnerships, structure, and process. The second is Offering, which covers what you actually create: the product, its performance, and the systems around it. The third is Experience, which is about how customers or users interact with what's been built: the service, the channel, the brand, and how people engage.
Why does this matter? Because research shows that most organisations are only innovating in one of these areas, usually product. And breakthroughs tend to happen when four to six types are combined intentionally, not just one.
A concrete example: a workplace team redesigning an office normally focuses on product performance. Better furniture, better layout. Using Doblin, they add three more types. Network: partner with proptech companies to test smart sensors. Process: redesign how decisions about space get made so experimentation can happen faster. Customer Engagement: build feedback loops with employees rather than assuming what they need. The outcome becomes a system, not just a nicer office.
The second question: can the organisation actually support it?
Knowing where to innovate raises a harder question. Is the organisation designed to do it?
The Ambidextrous Organisation describes a tension that most leadership teams run into eventually. On one side is Exploit: efficiency, process, optimisation, and ROI. On the other is Explore: experimentation, uncertainty, learning, and discovery. Both are necessary. Problems start when one overwhelms the other.
When efficiency dominates, experimentation gets suffocated. Every new idea gets measured against current performance metrics, which it can never meet, because it's not current. When exploration runs unchecked, operations lose stability and nothing scales.
The key insight is that these two modes need to coexist, but under different rules. Innovation needs space, autonomy, and psychological safety. Operations need clarity, consistency, and trust. Putting them under the same management structure, the same KPIs, and the same planning cycle is what kills most initiatives.
A real example: a company wants to explore how AI could transform their workspace strategy. But the facilities team is focused on daily operations. Without a structural separation between the two, the AI exploration gets deprioritised every time something operational comes up, which is every week. This is why ideas disappear after workshops, pilots never scale, and organisations feel busy without becoming meaningfully different.
The third question: how does an idea actually move forward?
Once you know where to look and the organisation has the right conditions, the Innovation Funnel, developed by IDEO, explains how ideas progress.
It has three stages. Inspiration is the first, and it's about understanding unmet needs, patterns, and constraints before jumping to solutions. Employee interviews. Space utilisation data. Observation. Not assumptions. Ideation comes next: generating, combining, and shaping ideas into actual concepts. This is where possibilities get tested against each other, not just listed. Implementation is the third stage: piloting, scaling, and measuring impact. Not just building, but learning from what gets built.
The funnel matters because it protects teams from the most common mistake in innovation: jumping straight from a problem to a solution without doing the middle work. A company redesigning its hybrid work model should start with Inspiration. What's actually not working? For whom? Only once those answers exist does the design work begin.
How the three work together
Used separately, each framework answers one question. Used together, they cover the full system.
Doblin shows where innovation might live. It is the strategic map, most useful early on when you need to understand where opportunities actually exist and where your organisation has gaps.
The Ambidextrous Organisation explains how to protect innovation once it starts. It is the leadership and operating model question, most relevant when innovation and daily operations start to collide, which they always do.
The Innovation Funnel guides how ideas move from inspiration to implementation. It is the process and execution framework, most useful during project delivery and pilot cycles when the actual work is happening.
Together, they form a complete view of innovation that connects strategy, leadership, and execution. Not a destination, but a set of questions you now know how to answer.
