innovaya’s innovation life-cycle view

We apply a full lifecycle approach that helps organizations select what to grow, nurture promising ideas, and harvest the impact of their innovations. It also addresses how to improve these deployed innovations over time so they can continue to deliver, or when an innovation is no longer impactful, when renewal may be necessary.

Without a shared lifecycle, innovation often feels chaotic: too many ideas, uneven follow-through, and uncertainty about when to invest more or let go. Unfortunately, good intentions don’t reliably translate into sustained impact. Our model applies to all different types of innovations and blends proven approaches from Lean Start-up, lean strategy and planning, iterative development, and portfolio management into a simple, intuitive structure:

Survey >> Select >> Sow >> Grow >> Harvest

Survey: Understand What Drives Your Needs for Innovation

This strategic phase helps you identify opportunities (seeds) for innovation by examining:

  • Beneficiary, donor, member, volunteer, and staff experiences
  • Cycles and relationships within your ecosystem
  • Trends and environmental shifts
  • The direction set by your mission, vision, and strategy

And then determining what new strategic opportunities exist. This is where new direction is set and where ideas, as options, begin.

Select: Defining, Evaluating, and Prioritizing Innovation Ideas

Organizations can’t do everything that they want to do. Likewise, innovation initiatives can have different natures; new ideas to be tested, more developed innovative solutions to be scaled and deployed, or existing solutions to be improved. This phase helps organizations:

  • Define the options available
  • Evaluate innovation and understand where it starts – new innovation, one ready for scaling, or a continuous improvement effort
  • Prioritize the options available

This helps you avoid trying to take on too much, over burdening your staff, and stalling out from lack of progress.

Sow: Reducing Risks of Non-Acceptance and Infeasibility

New ideas enter the funnel at this stage once they have a clear need with a potential solution and audience it will benefit. This phase serves to answer:

  • Will this resonate with the people we serve?
  • Is there evidence this is worth pursuing?
  • Does it need tweaking?
  • Perhaps it should be abandoned?

Lean Start-up methods help drive out high risk assumptions early and avoid building ideas that nobody wants.

Grow: Iterate Towards Scalable, Viable Solutions

Once the desirability and riskiest feasibility questions are resolved, we shift to an iterative, incremental development mode. We’re still testing the idea, but now more focused on viability; it’s scaling and integration. Here we explore:

  • How will this work best at the scale we need?
  • Is it cost-effective, ethical, and operationally viable?
  • How will this innovation transfer into operation?
  • What new skills will be needed?

This phase strengthens the innovation until it is ready for deployment. It is focused on reducing the chance of rolling out a fragile solution that people may resist.

Harvest: Managing and Optimizing Operational Innovations

In Harvest, the focus is on –

  • Improving solution performance
  • Making small, continuous improvements
  • Determining when a solution is nearing end-of-life
  • Recognize the need for renewal

This is where organizations maximize the outcomes of what they’ve deployed. It addresses stagnation and decay that can be avoided and proactively identifies when a new growth may need to replace the old growth.

Iterate for More Innovation

This set of ‘phases’, each having its own iteration cycles, also iterate back on itself, tying Harvest back to Survey. This evolves innovations from novel concepts to services or products with their own differentiating features to platforms and communities that then can create more unique opportunities.

Innovation Portfolio: Providing Innovation Management Visibility

Across all phases, we gather evidence from experiments, performance metrics, and pipeline health indicators. These insights help the organization’s teams and management:

  • Make informed decisions
  • Articulate the outcomes they are achieving
  • Improve the innovation management system itself

As innovation fluency grows, the system becomes self-reinforcing. Visual reinforcement of evidence and data helps everyone keep their eye on what is important.

Why This Matters

Our approach gives mission-driven organizations a clear, manageable way to handle multiple innovations at once without complexity or jargon. This turns innovation into intentional practice rather than a luck-based blossoming.  We believe this full life-cycle view, combined with our focus on cultivating your internal capability, sets Innovaya apart.

Acknowledgements

The Survey phase with its strategic focus leans heavily on strategy and planning used within the Toyota Production System, as well as Human Systems Dynamics, Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, and Systems Thinking with additional techniques from various strategy, collaboration, and innovation pioneers.

The Select phase is heavily influenced by Lean concepts such as limiting work in progress and Theory of Constraints; it likewise is part of the more tactical planning. used within the Toyota Production System.

The Sow and Grow phases are based on the approaches of Lean Startup and project approaches for iterative development like Extreme Programming, Crystal, and Scrum.

The improvement concepts used in the Harvest phase to optimize performance originate dually from the Toyota Production System and applications of the concept of Retrospectives from project management by Norm Kerth and furthered by Esther Derby, Diana Larsen, and Jutta Eckstein.

Evolving innovations relates directly to the concept of maturity within Wardley Maps created by Simon Wardley.

Finally, the visibility advocated within the Innovation Portfolio comes from techniques used within Toyota and other lean organizations.