Diagnostic Brief
Playbook
Integrated Architecture for Innovations and Value Systems
The problem
An organisation can have the best solution in its market and still watch the returns go to someone else. Good ideas are copied quickly, because formal registration protects less than people tend to assume, and late entrants almost always spend less to imitate than the innovator spent to create.
EMI invented the CT scanner and, eight years after launching it in the United States, had exited the business, while companies that arrived later came to dominate the market because they already had manufacturing, sales networks and technical support already in place with hospitals.
The lasting returns from an innovation depend less on the idea and more on what the organisation controls around it, such as the channels that carry the solution to the user, the reputation of the brand and the practical experience that only its team and its partners have built. The warning sign usually comes when the product works, the first clients have arrived and growth has become the problem.
The lens
Those who lead an innovation usually master one side. Some organisations are strong at creating value, with a solid product, validated technology and engaged users, and watch that value slip away before it becomes a return because they lack the structure, the protection of what they built and the readiness to raise funding. Others are strong at capturing value, with a clear model and organised revenue, and their traction does not hold because the product has drifted away from the people who use it.
Betting that the best product wins on its own merit leads to the EMI case, and betting that structure makes up for an immature product leads to a well-protected organisation with no clients. In both cases, the mistake is not in the execution but in the belief that creating and capturing value are separate problems.
Integrated Architecture for Innovations is how we bring together the two axes that hold up an innovation: product architecture, which determines whether and how it is adopted, and governance, which determines whether the value it generates stays with the innovator.
Design
Determines whether and how the innovation is adopted.
Governance
Determines whether the value it generates stays with the innovator.
Value
Value is not the same thing for every organisation. For a company, it is margin and a position that holds; for a community, it is the autonomy to decide its own future; for the public sector, it is the direction an initiative gives to the development of society. Each one creates value in its own way, keeps it in its own way and loses it in its own way, and asking how much value was generated without asking for whom describes only half the story.
The return of a company that innovates depends on the control it holds over the sales channels, the reputation of the brand and the infrastructure around its offer, and on the practical experience that only its team and its network of partners have built. It destroys value when it chases short-term profit by squeezing suppliers, partners and the team, because, if the surrounding network grows poorer or loses technical capacity, the company suffocates the ecosystem it depends on to keep innovating.
In the third sector and in communities, value is not measured in profit. It lies in preserving shared resources and in strengthening people’s autonomy to decide their own future together, and it takes hold when the project builds its own rules of governance and the capacity to decide at the local level. Raising a community’s income is not enough if it loses its voice over the direction of the project, which happens when community resources are privatised, when decision-making concentrates in a few hands or when participation serves only to endorse what has already been decided.
In the public sector, the value of an initiative is measured by the clear direction it gives to the development of society and by its capacity to keep producing results after the initial funding ends. The state generates public value by acting as an investor of first resort, taking on the long-term uncertainty that private capital avoids and shaping new markets geared towards structural solutions for society. It is lost when the gains of a project funded with public money end up concentrated in a few companies, when governance loses transparency or when the public body does not retain the technical learning and stays dependent on third parties to operate.
An innovation arrangement holds when its design, that is, who controls what, what is written down and who decides, lets each party keep the value that matters to it without cancelling out the others’.
The Journey
The Five-Stage Journey is the model SixTree created to locate an organisation according to where the value of its innovation sits, from the thesis that still lives in the team’s heads to the value created that returns to the system and makes new phases of innovation possible.
The sequence makes it easier to read, but practice is less linear: an organisation can be in more than one stage at the same time, and the last one reopens the first.
The thesis is still being validated: the first users appear and the value lives in the team’s heads. The work is to prove, in real conditions, that the problem exists and that your solution solves it.
The product exists, the market has responded and the operation has gained traction; the form of the solution starts to settle, and with it comes the window to decide what to protect, what to control and whom to partner with so that the return stays with the organisation. It is also when the typical bottlenecks appear: an operation that depends on one or two people and finances that are hard to verify.
Value leaves people’s heads and enters the structure: what should be documented is documented, and what should stay protected stays protected. The organisation separates operating from innovating, each with its own team and budget, and becomes ready to be assessed by third parties.
Value stops living in the product alone and starts living in the relationships: clients, partners and suppliers tied to your standard, with a real cost to swapping you for someone else. Growing here means controlling what delivers your product and holding margins when volume puts them under pressure.
The value captured returns to the system: it funds new lines of work, and each new line restarts the cycle at Prospecting. Those who get here renew themselves with what they have accumulated, without being trapped by what brought them this far, and the measure of success becomes the capability each cycle builds.
The Brief
Each stage changes what protects an organisation’s value and what exposes it. The Diagnostic Brief reads your organisation’s position from what has already happened in your operation and tells you, free of charge, where it stands and what needs attention first.