The Innovation Frame™ (TIF) is a flexible model designed to manage innovation by allowing users to explore both high-level concepts and detailed applications. It comprises various components including stakeholders, resources, associations, values, tools, formulas, iterations, mindsets, a canvas, and a dictionary, facilitating the innovation process through structured experimentation and documentation. TIF encourages iterative learning and adapts to different innovation challenges without presuming a static value creation model.

1. The Innovation Frame™
A New Model for Making Innovation Happen
The Innovation Frame™ (TIF) is a model for managing and practicing innovation on any scale. It is meant
to allow users to start simple with innovation as a high-level concept, but allow them to “drill down” to
further detail as advanced applications are desired. TIF’s architecture is similar and complementary to
the Business Model Canvas® (Osterwalder, et al), and although it uses some different categories and
nomenclature, each can work either in concert with or completely independently from the other.
The Innovation Frame Components
TIF is an independent eco-system of innovation-specific components (see also, image below):
1. Stakeholders – The various categories of organizations and/or individuals, which are sufficiently
relevant, that they must be recognized and considered within the system.
2. Resources – Any and all assets, whether tangible or intangible, that are available (or are reasonably
accessible from) within the system, that have the potential to help create new value.
3. Associations – Connections between two stakeholders, between stakeholders and resources, or
between two resources, along which elements of value can be exchanged.
4. Values – The prioritized set of internal determinants of worth or importance within each
stakeholder, impacting needs/problems, and influencing his/her/its rational decision-making.
5. Tools – The instruments, techniques, models, and insights utilized within the innovation process.
These include both legacy and newly-emerging tools.
6. Formulas – A particular set of recipe-like uses and approaches for both tools and resources.
Formulas are generic ways of applying tools to resources to create new value for stakeholders.
7. Iterations – The basic cyclical process of experimentation, consisting of four phases (STEP™:
Strategy, Trial, Error, Perception), used within the innovation system.
8. Mindsets – The cognitive attitudes, assumptions, perspectives, orientations, cultures, and habits
that characterize one or more stakeholders (including the innovator) at any given time.
9. Canvas – (optional) The platform upon which all business model components are arranged and
represented, analogous to a blueprint, a diagram, a desktop, or a map (i.e. “landscape”).
10. Dictionary – The documentation of all TIF components, including a listing of stakeholders, the
annotation of resources, schedules of stakeholders’ values (and their prioritizations), an inventory of
recipes and tools, the
status of mindsets
(including explicitly
stated assumptions),
and all activities,
observations, insights,
and changes in value. It
also contains
background information
and instructions for
utilizing TIF, and working
definitions of basic
terms.
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2. The Innovation Frame™
A New Model for Making Innovation Happen
The Innovation Frame Process
The way that TIF is used depends upon the particular type of innovation challenge at hand. Starting with
the typical scenario, you are the innovator, trying to solve a problem for one specific stakeholder. With
this in mind, TIF would suggest the following as your process (as with all portions of this approach,
consider repeatedly revisiting, refining, and adding to each step as you continuously learn and better
understand elements of TIF):
A. Define the problem by writing a problem statement; refine this iteratively over time.
B. Identify all key stakeholders (first by category, then individually).
C. Understand the values (positioning) of each stakeholder, by each one’s priorities.
D. Identify all available resources that could possibly be used in your innovation process.
E. Consider which formula(s) to use for various resources, tools, and/or stakeholders.
F. Utilize the STEP™ cycle to iteratively experiment with formula applications.
G. Observe and measure the impacts of the formula applications.
H. Continue until sufficient value is created.
I. Include the use of additional tools, participants, iterations as needed.
J. Represent action steps/impacts upon canvas or component areas.
K. Document throughout within the dictionary.
The Innovation Frame Guidelines & Insights
You can use TIF to any degree of formality you choose.
You can substitute your own tools or other components within TIF as you see fit. For example in
addition to Formulas, you can utilize techniques such as SCAMPER and TRIZ.
It is recommended that you use a variety of tools throughout the process. For example, every
time you are to “identify” a stakeholder or resource or “select” a tool or formula, this is an
opportunity to utilize a brainstorming tool. Likewise, when trying to understand stakeholder
values, you may want to utilize an innovation-related assessment, survey tool, or
anthropological observations. Also, while reflecting during the STEP™ cycle, this would be one
opportunity to utilize the Cubie™ dimensional inquiry model.
TIF doesn’t seek one final/static model; it seeks multiple options through repeated iteration.
The “magic” is not in the model
itself (TIF), but in how you use it.
Unlike the Business Model Canvas (BMC),
TIF does not presume that value is being
created for one or more customers; rather
that value can be created by and for any
combination of stakeholders. In this case,
“customers” would simply be one type of
stakeholder (“key partners” would be
another). Similarly, while BMC has “costs”
and “revenues,” TIF simplifies these down
to merely one example each of positive
and negative value, which flows both
ways along the associations between and
among stakeholders. Formulas are
analogous to abstracted “key activities.”
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