Innovation drives growth and simplicity. As organizations mature, processes emerge that tamp down peoples’ abilities to identify opportunities and go after them right away. Great ideas for incremental, adjacent, and disruptive innovation languish. More nimble competitors beat incumbents to the punch. The solution is to empower employees to spot and test innovations quickly – fast fail to minimize risk, or scale and extend results.

Schaffer helps leaders develop innovation strategy, facilitate rapid-cycle innovation sprints, and build their teams’ innovation capabilities.

Effective innovation strategy is grounded in customer needs. We teach teams to empathize with internal and external customers to grow understanding of diverse perspectives. Schaffer supports clients to leverage those insights to design and facilitate fast, low-risk experiments that test the validity of potential solutions. Whether improving operational excellence, launching new products or services, or creating new business models, our approach accelerates the pace of learning necessary to separate winning opportunities from lower-impact ones. By explicitly including capability development into the pursuit of innovation, we enable clients to accelerate results achievement. Team members build the skills necessary to more effectively pursue the complex, ambiguous task of innovation.

Schaffer brings a unique understanding of the dynamics that separate strong innovators from the rest of the pack. Our research has identified four distinct conditions that characterize highly successful innovation teams.

• Constant Energy: Create productive tension that keeps people in the innovation zone
• Creative Friction: Enable rich interaction to generate diverse ideas
• Flexible Structures: Define direction while maximizing speed and agility
• Purposeful Discovery: Quickly test possibilities to develop user centered solutions

Established companies have both the ideas and the resources to pursue them. But unlocking the power of that potential demands dismantling bureaucratic obstacles and creating the right conditions for innovation to thrive.

To learn more about our thinking and work on Innovation, see our case studies, articles, books, and blogs below or contact us.