From Frustration to Flow: The ‘Five Mindsets’ Framework for Innovation Effectiveness

Let’s face it — it’s 2024! Despite investing in Design capability, many organizations struggle with innovation implementation.

During the early 2010s, organizations looking to improve their innovation capability hired designers and researchers or acquired design agencies to support business growth, giving rise to the design acquisitions movement between 2010–2020. Organizations invested in two areas: 1/ They established an internal design capability that collaborates with their in-house R&D teams to develop new growth opportunities; 2/ For the first time, they appointed designers to take on senior leadership positions.

While this was a significant step towards building the capability, many business leaders had a limited view of the role of ‘Design’ in innovation, and many organizations still fail to recognize it today. Organizational leaders believed that perhaps adding an in-house innovation team would somehow help them become more customer-centric and consciously innovative. However, this did not happen.

At Khoj Lab, through multiple rounds of research and development, we defined five critical areas for organizations to maximize their value impact and build effectiveness in their innovation efforts, which we call the Five Mindsets framework. Each mindset has four key aspects that help organizational leaders take a holistic and systematic approach to improving conditions, broadening opportunities, advocating for change, and enhancing team impact.

Read the full article on Medium for an explanation and examples for each mindset in detail >>