Innovation Playbook

An innovation playbook is the written, owned and repeatable version of how a company innovates: the stages an idea passes through, the criteria that kill it or fund it, the templates teams fill in, the cadence of the meetings, and the names of the people allowed to decide. Our innovation playbook work builds that system inside your company and hands it over, so the next cycle runs without a consultant in the room. Vivaldi has built playbooks of this kind for companies including American Express, Western Union, Takeda, Renault and Autograph Collection Hotels.

• Since 1999strategy, brand and innovation consulting
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

The trigger is almost never a shortage of ideas. It is that innovation keeps restarting from zero.

• A strategy consultancy has just left, the slides are good, and nobody inside can run the next round on their own.
• Every business unit innovates in its own way, so nothing can be compared, pooled or prioritized across the company.
• Ideas are generated energetically and then stall, because no one is clear on who is allowed to say no, or on what evidence.
• An innovation team was stood up, staffed, and is now producing concepts the operating businesses will not adopt.
• A new chief executive or chief innovation officer has to show a working method inside a year, not a portfolio of pilots.

Why training and toolkits do not stick

Most attempts at this problem buy a workshop series or a toolkit license. Both treat the gap as a skills gap. It usually is not. The teams can run a sprint perfectly well. What they cannot do is get a decision out of the organization at the end of it, because the criteria for funding the next stage were never written down, the budget still sits with the annual planning cycle, and the person who would have to stop a running project has no authority to do it.

So the toolkit gets used once, for the project it was taught on, and then quietly stops. The method lived in a training deck and in the memory of whoever attended. A playbook is different in one specific way: it is tied to the company’s real decision calendar, its real budget mechanics and its real job titles. If it does not say who signs, when, and against which threshold, it is a toolkit with a better cover.

The second failure is subtler. Companies document the front of the process in detail, because ideation is the part that is enjoyable to write about, and leave the back of it blank. There is no agreed way to record what a dead project taught, so the next team repeats the experiment. The learning loop is the part that compounds, and it is the part most often missing.

What our innovation playbook services include

Six bodies of work. Most engagements use four or five of them, and the sequence depends on where the current process breaks.

1. Process design

We map how an idea actually travels through your company today, including the informal routes, and then design the version that should exist: the stages, what each one is for, what has to be true to leave it, and how long it is allowed to take. The output is a process a team can follow without being taught it in person.

2. Decision gates and funding criteria

Each gate gets a written threshold and a named owner. We define what evidence a team must bring, what a pass means in money and people, and what a fail means in practice, including how a stopped project is closed down without the team being penalized for it.

3. The working tool kit

Briefs, opportunity templates, scoring sheets, business case formats and the one page a team takes into a gate review. These are built against your categories and your language, not generic forms, and they are deliberately few. A playbook with forty templates gets ignored.

4. Governance and decision rights

Who sits on the innovation board, how often it meets, what it is allowed to approve without escalating, and how innovation funding relates to the annual budget cycle. This is the part that determines whether anything in the playbook has force.

5. Measurement and the learning loop

A small set of measures that distinguish pipeline health from launch outcomes, plus the mechanism for feeding results, including failures, back into the criteria. We define where that record lives and who is responsible for updating it, because an unowned repository is an empty one.

6. Handover and the first live cycle

We run the playbook once with your teams on a real opportunity, not a training case, and revise it against what breaks. Then we train the internal owners, hand over the editable source, and leave.

How an innovation playbook engagement works

1. Trace. We follow two or three recent ideas end to end, one that launched and one that died, and interview everyone who touched them. The output is an honest map of the process you have, which is rarely the one on the intranet.
2. Design. Stages, gates, criteria, roles and cadence, drafted with the people who will have to live inside them and stress-tested against your budget calendar.
3. Run. One live cycle on a real opportunity, with us in the room, so the playbook is corrected against reality rather than against opinion.
4. Hand over. Training for the internal owners, the editable source files, and a review date. The playbook is yours to change, and it should be changed.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for innovation playbook work

We are a strategy firm that does innovation work, not a training provider. That matters because the hard part of a playbook is not the templates, it is deciding what the criteria should be, and that is a strategy question about where this company can win.

We also write to be left behind. The deliverable is not a report about your innovation process. It is the process, in a form your teams can edit, in your language, with your product categories in the examples. We have been building systems of this kind since 1999, and the firm’s own named methods, including Demand-First Innovation and Growth, exist because we had to make our own work repeatable before we could make anyone else’s.

Finally, we are small enough that the people who design the playbook are the people who run the first cycle with you. There is no handover from a strategy team to a delivery team, because there is no second team.

How to evaluate an innovation playbook consultant

• Ask who owns the playbook after the engagement, by job title, and what happens at the first review.
• Ask to see a gate criterion they have written for another client, with the threshold on it. Vague answers here predict vague deliverables.
• Ask whether they will run a live cycle with you or only train your teams. Training alone almost never survives contact with the budget cycle.
• Ask how the playbook connects to annual planning. If the answer is that it does not, the playbook has no money behind it.
• Ask what they do about killed projects. A firm with no answer has not thought about the half of the process that actually compounds.

Innovation playbook consultancy, innovation training provider or an internal center of excellence?

Related work

This page covers the repeatable method and the tooling: how your company runs innovation after we leave. The adjacent questions sit on their own pages.

• Innovation strategy decides which bets the portfolio makes and how they are governed.
• Product and service innovation decides which products and services to create.
• Growth strategy decides where growth is going to come from.
• Open innovation covers sourcing innovation from parties outside the company.
• Business model innovation answers whether the model itself has to change.
• Business experimentation designs the single test that could disprove an assumption, where a playbook sets the standing rules for running tests at all.
• AI innovation capabilities builds internal AI capability specifically. The boundary is simple: that page is about what your teams can do with AI, this page is about the process they follow whether or not AI is involved.
• Growth strategy and innovation is the parent practice these services sit inside.

Innovation playbooks in the US and worldwide

We work from 10 offices on four continents, and most playbook engagements are multi-market from the start, because the companies that need one usually have the same process running five different ways in five different regions.

That changes the design brief. A playbook written for one head office and translated afterward gets treated as head office paperwork. We write the parts that must be identical, usually the gates, the criteria and the reporting format, and the parts each market is free to adapt, usually the research methods and the cadence. The boundary between the two is the design decision that determines whether the playbook is adopted or quietly worked around.