The 5 Stage Approach

A blueprint for supporting the innovation process

Abstract

It has long been recognised that entrepreneurs see potential opportunity in their external environment (Drucker, 1985) and are often considered to be extremely innovative and able to come up with fresh ideas for new businesses and products. However whilst entrepreneurs do not have to be extremely innovative to be successful, they do have to understand and manage the innovation process within their own business in order to build a successful enterprise. A good idea fulfils a need in the marketplace and in doing so generates profit for the business. In order to commercialise their ideas the entrepreneur will need to generate, filter and develop these ideas in order to build a framework or business model which will determine how the company will be constructed. This paper adopts an anecdotal approach to data gathering and draws on the experience of the researcher whilst building on seminal theory relating to innovation leading to a new, foundation process model for supporting innovation in any domain. This novel model combines a range of appropriate lenses, techniques and tools which can be applied to improve outcomes at each of the stages of the process identified namely: 1. finding the ideas, 2. generating more ideas, 3. filtering the ideas, 4. testing the ideas and 5. developing the ideas.