PART I

The Frame Game

As discussed in the preface, this book contains two parts. The first part represents the primary focus of the book: the process of framing innovation challenges to understand better where to allocate resources for generating ideas. Some describe this as the “fuzzy front end” of the innovation process.

Part I will discuss the organizational context of how assumptions organizations make about challenges can impact the success of their innovation efforts. Six chapters will describe how to involve stakeholders in question banks (Q-banks) and challenge banks (C-banks) to identify strategic areas requiring innovation. Other chapters in this part will focus on the essential criteria needed to evaluate potential challenges, how to write challenge briefs, ways to create conceptual maps depicting relationships between challenges, and how to plan for and conduct innovation challenges.