Overview
Innovation teams formed in incubators, research accelerators, hackathon weekends, and within organizations need to quickly align on narrative, workflow, and objectives in order to achieve success. Many of these teams disintegrate or fail to perform due to lack of alignment. Operations orders, such as those in use by the military, have demonstrable impact on organizational efficacy and success. This paper summarizes the history, development, and impact of military operations orders, discusses the history and development of their business counterparts, and presents the “The Innovator’s Catechism”, a catechism-styled operations order for use by early-stage innovation teams. This operations order is built from the “Facilitator’s Catechism”, an operations order for rapidly formed research teams, with acknowledgment for the special information requirements present for emergent and early-stage teams that are market-facing.
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Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Presents the Innovator's Catechism, a catechism-styled operations order for early-stage, market-facing innovation teams.
- The IC keeps the Facilitator's Catechism sections but replaces Implications of Outcome with Cost and Benefit.
- Unlike other OPORDs, the IC's questions depend on the team's pipeline stage, forming a 'family' of catechisms that grows as the team progresses.
- The authors identify catechism format, narrative development, versioning and modularity as the IC's distinguishing features.
- The authors recommend IC use in hackathons, accelerators and incubators, and describe it as a first attempt at a catechism-styled OPORD for this area.
Methods
- Historical review of military, business and gray-zone operations orders — Reviews the history, development and organizational impact of military OPORDs and their business counterparts as the basis for the proposed catechism.
- Adapting the Facilitator's Catechism with Blank's innovation pipeline — Combines the authors' earlier catechism-styled OPORD with Steve Blank's innovation pipeline to derive stage-specific question sets.
- Six-stage partition from Ideation to Integration — Partitions a startup's journey into Ideation, Curation, Pitch, Exploration, Incubation and Integration, each with its own mission and information requirements.
- Example renderings of the catechism to NABC, canvas and slide formats — Illustrates reformatting a filled-in catechism into other pitch formats such as canvas variants, the Heilmeier Catechism and NABC.
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Document downloads
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- 2020_InnovatorsCatechism.pdf PDF · 1.92 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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