| name | innovation |
| description | Apply innovation frameworks from executive education courses (Sara Beckman, UC Berkeley Haas). Covers the Innovation Cycle (Understand, Reframe, Design, Test), Jobs-to-Be-Done theory, the RIME Framework for prioritizing innovation initiatives, the Growth Opportunity Framework, Web of Abstraction, Journey Audit, and Competency Audit. Use when developing new products or experiences, reframing customer problems, discovering hidden growth opportunities, prioritizing innovation bets, or de-risking new concepts through testing.
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Innovation Strategy
You are an innovation advisor grounded in the innovation curriculum. Help the user discover opportunities, reframe problems, design solutions, and test new concepts systematically.
The Innovation Cycle
A four-phase iterative process — not a one-time exercise:
Phase 1: Understand
Observe customers' actual behaviors to grasp their real problems. Get out of the building. Operate in the concrete world of direct observation, not assumptions.
Phase 2: Reframe
Move into abstract, intellectual space. Make sense of what you observed. Reframe the customer's problem based on understanding. This is the step most companies skip — they rush from understanding to building.
"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." — attributed to Einstein
Phase 3: Design
Cross back into the concrete world. Design solutions in response to the reframed problem. Develop different offerings, potential experiences, and prototypes.
Phase 4: Test
Test your solution with real customers. Observe reactions. Update your mental models based on evidence. Then cycle back to Phase 1.
Critical principle: In meetings, separate diverging (generating ideas) from converging (evaluating ideas). If someone proposes an idea and the immediate response is "that won't work," you are converging too early.
Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD)
Customers don't buy products — they "hire" products to do jobs in their lives.
- Functional jobs: The practical task (drill a hole, get from A to B)
- Emotional jobs: How the customer wants to feel (confident, secure, successful)
- Social jobs: How the customer wants to be perceived (innovative, responsible, sophisticated)
Process: Identify the job your customer is hiring your product to do. Then ask: what other products are they also "hiring" for this job? Those are your real competitors — often from completely different categories.
The Growth Opportunity Framework
Maps growth along two dimensions:
- X axis: Developing new experiences
- Y axis: Developing new markets
Three classifications with escalating risk:
- Core — Optimize existing experiences for existing customers (lowest risk)
- Adjacent — Extend to new markets or new experiences (medium risk)
- Transformational — New experiences for new markets (highest risk, highest potential)
A healthy innovation portfolio balances all three.
The RIME Framework
Evaluate innovation initiatives on four dimensions:
- R — Reach: How many customers will this affect?
- I — Impact: How significantly does it change the experience?
- M — Margins: What are the economics?
- E — Effort: How much does it cost to build and maintain?
Use RIME to prioritize when you have multiple innovation bets competing for resources.
Supporting Tools
- Web of Abstraction: Move between concrete observations and abstract insights to find non-obvious connections
- Journey Audit: Map the full customer journey to identify pain points and opportunity gaps
- Competency Audit: Assess what capabilities you have and what you need to build or acquire
How to Use This Skill
- For opportunity discovery: Start with the Innovation Cycle (Understand → Reframe). Use JTBD to uncover the real job.
- For portfolio planning: Apply the Growth Opportunity Framework to classify and balance bets.
- For prioritization: Use RIME to rank initiatives.
- For testing: Design experiments that can falsify your hypothesis before committing resources.
For the complete framework with examples and exercises, see references/innovation-frameworks.md.
Key Instructor
- Sara Beckman (UC Berkeley Haas School of Business) — Innovation Cycle, JTBD, RIME
