Structured innovation is a planned, purposeful and scheduled journey that generates and transforms ideas into impact through a series of manageable steps, practical templates and concrete outcomes.
Creativity needs freedom. Uncertainty needs structure. Effective innovation provides both in one journey.
In this fifth Innovation Authority pillar, I explain what structured innovation is, why it must never become bureaucracy and how a clear assignment, fixed rhythm, practical templates, validation and shared ownership help organisations move from opportunity to impact. I also show how the FORTH Innovation Methodology brings innovation effectiveness, barrier-breaking, discipline and ownership together—and why independent research found that it substantially increases innovation success.
Many CEOs tell their people that innovation is essential. Then the organisation holds an inspiring kick-off, gathers fifteen people in a room and fills the walls with hundreds of Post-it notes.
At the end, someone says: “Wonderful work. We will structure the ideas and come back to you.”
Then nothing happens.
One week passes. Then two. No follow-up meeting has been scheduled. Nobody knows who is evaluating the ideas, which criteria are being used or whether anything will happen at all. The participants return to their daily responsibilities and the energy disappears.
Three months later, management asks why innovation is moving so slowly.
The organisation did not suffer from a lack of creativity. It suffered from a lack of structure.
Innovation is not one inspired moment. It is the shared generation and purposeful transformation of original ideas into real impact under great uncertainty. That journey requires freedom, but freedom alone is not enough. It also requires direction, rhythm, evidence, decisions, ownership and concrete outcomes.
This creates one of the central paradoxes of innovation:
Uncertainty needs structure, while creativity needs freedom. Effective innovation provides both in one journey.
After more than 25 years of leading innovation projects, I have learned that most organisations do not have an idea problem. They have a journey problem. They start enthusiastically but have no reliable route from ambition to implementation.
Structured innovation provides that route.
Structured innovation is a planned, purposeful and scheduled journey that generates and transforms ideas into impact through a series of manageable steps, practical templates and concrete outcomes.
Every word matters.
And impact is the destination. Ideas, prototypes and pilots are intermediate outputs. Innovation becomes meaningful when a solution is implemented, adopted and creating value.
Structured innovation is therefore not the same as having a collection of tools or organising a sequence of workshops. It is a complete and connected journey from strategic direction to discovery, idea generation, validation, business reality, ownership and implementation.
Radical innovation begins with enormous uncertainty. You do not know which solution will work, how customers will respond, which technology will mature or which business model will prove viable.
Structure cannot provide those answers. It provides a reliable way to search for them.
Imagine sailing towards one of the Dutch islands in the North Sea. First, you must decide which island you want to reach. That is the innovation assignment: the destination that gives the journey strategic direction.
At sea, red and green buoys mark a navigable route. You still have to respond to the wind, the current and changing conditions. You tack, manoeuvre and make decisions. The buoys do not sail the boat for you and they do not determine every movement. They help you navigate towards the destination without running aground.
Structured innovation works in the same way.
The complete journey is prepared in advance. The workshops are placed in everyone’s calendars from the kick-off onwards. The team moves in a fixed rhythm: tack, tack, tack, tack. The schedule creates momentum, commitment and urgency. There is no easy escape into postponement because the next workshop is already approaching.
Instead of asking people to make one enormous leap, the process guides them through a series of manageable steps. Yet when they reach the end and look back, they realise that they did not make a small step at all. Together, they made a jump.
Structured innovation creates a radical jump through a series of manageable steps.
At predetermined moments, the team diverges to discover possibilities and converges to make choices. Every completed step produces insight, understanding and confidence. That confidence motivates people to take the next step and gives them the courage to become more radical.
Structure therefore creates psychological safety. Participants understand where they have come from, where they are now and what they must do next. They do not need to see the complete answer. They need enough confidence to continue searching for it.
The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need for structure.
Good structure helps innovators navigate. Bureaucracy tries to control their journey from the shore.
My early frustration came from innovation processes managed by people outside the innovation team. They often oversaw Stage-Gate portfolios containing ten, twenty, thirty or more than fifty projects. Their responsibility was legitimate: decide which projects should continue, pivot, pause or stop, and allocate scarce organisational resources.
Portfolio governance has an important role. Stage-Gate and FORTH can complement each other. FORTH creates and validates opportunities during the fuzzy front end; those business cases can subsequently enter development and portfolio governance.
The problem begins when governance turns into unnecessary bureaucracy imposed on innovators by people who are not experiencing the journey. They stand on the shore and attempt to steer a ship they are not aboard.
The innovation team has met customers, explored technologies, tested assumptions and experienced surprises. The people on the shore receive reports and forms. Yet they try to prescribe every movement.
Why should people on the shore determine every movement of the ship? The people aboard understand the wind, the current and what is happening at sea.
Good structure works differently. It provides direction, rhythm and clarity without creating unnecessary approvals, waiting or reporting.
In the FORTH Innovation Methodology, decision-makers join the expedition as extended team members. They are not the captain and do not manage every activity, but they are aboard. When an important choice arises, they understand the conditions and can help determine the direction in real time.
Every FORTH template helps the team move forward. These are process templates, not content templates. They help participants diverge when exploration is needed and converge when choices must be made. They never dictate which customer problem, technology or business model the team must choose.
Within clear boundaries, the team retains autonomy.
Bureaucracy controls people. Good structure enables people.
Without a pre-planned journey, the first workshop is often also the last.
A wall filled with 400 ideas looks impressive, but it is not progress if nobody knows what happens next. In large organisations, everyone’s calendar is already full. If the team tries to plan a follow-up meeting with fifteen participants after the kick-off, the first available date may be three months away.
By then, the energy has disappeared, the context has been forgotten and participants have returned to their real jobs. The organisation must almost start again.
That is why the complete innovation journey should be block-booked before it begins. In FORTH, approximately fifteen working sessions and workshops are planned around the kick-off and the five stages. The exact format can vary, but the rhythm is protected.
A fixed schedule protects the business of tomorrow from the urgency of today.
Structure also requires a concrete deliverable from every step. Depending on the activity, the team may produce:
Every workshop contains its own divergence and convergence. Participants explore broadly and then produce a result. Visible progress creates pride. Pride creates enthusiasm for the next step.
When people can see progress, they begin to believe in the journey.
Design Thinking is wonderful for understanding people, questioning assumptions, creating ideas and developing prototypes. But in my experience, an isolated Design Thinking process may start too late and stop too early.
It starts too late when a team receives a predetermined briefing instead of involving decision-makers in formulating a strategically anchored innovation assignment. The creative work may then be insufficiently connected to the organisation’s priorities.
It stops too early when the process finishes with a promising idea or prototype rather than a validated and supported business case. The concept may be desirable, but the organisation is not yet ready to decide, invest and implement.
Structured innovation connects both ends.
At the beginning, the innovation assignment connects business strategy to creative exploration. During the journey, teams discover customer needs, generate ideas and test concepts. At Homecoming, the strongest concepts are connected to business reality and developed into mini new business cases.
The creative process helps people step outside the box. Business thinking helps them bring the strongest opportunities back inside the box—without squeezing out what made them original.
Combining business thinking and Design Thinking in a structured way turns creative energy into impact.
Structured innovation begins with a relevant innovation assignment anchored in business strategy. This makes the journey worthwhile. Decision-makers understand why it matters, participants know what they are trying to accomplish and the organisation has a strategic reason to implement the eventual outcomes.
It also requires a committed multidisciplinary team. Innovation rarely succeeds inside one silo. Different functions, perspectives and areas of expertise must work together, while decision-makers participate as extended team members.
The complete journey is planned before the kick-off. Returning to the sailing metaphor, the team knows which island it wants to reach and which buoys it must round along the way.
The essential elements are:
This produces a connected journey:
Learn. Generate. Cluster. Choose. Develop. Test. Validate. Build the business case. Implement.
Validation creates trust. Participation creates ownership. Ownership accelerates implementation.
I created FORTH out of frustration.
As a marketeer working in industry, I experienced innovation processes that were intended to help innovators but too often achieved the opposite. They became bureaucratic systems filled with forms, procedures, approvals and people slowing promising ideas down.
There was plenty of structure, but it was the wrong kind. It controlled innovation from the outside instead of helping innovators make progress from within the journey.
Later, as a strategy consultant, I encountered a different problem. Together with clients, we could develop strong strategies and exciting concepts. But once the consultants left, too little happened. The people expected to implement the result did not feel genuine ownership of it.
Those experiences taught me two lessons:
Bureaucracy cannot create innovation, and ownership cannot be transferred at the end.
In my early forties, I decided there had to be a better way to navigate the fuzzy front end of innovation.
As a business economist, I understood the importance of strategy, viability and concrete outcomes. I also recognised the power of creativity, customer discovery and what we now call Design Thinking. I began combining the two worlds.
Inspired by the great explorers, I designed innovation as an expedition with a clear business destination. An explorer begins with direction but cannot predict everything that will be encountered. The expedition requires preparation and discipline, but also discovery, courage and adaptation.
That became FORTH: start with a concrete innovation challenge and return fifteen weeks after the team kick-off with tested mini new business cases.
Ownership had to be built into the method. If innovators developed concepts in isolation and presented them to management at the end, resistance was predictable. That is why decision-makers join the expedition instead of sitting in a steering committee on the shore.
They help formulate the assignment, experience the insights, contribute ideas and become sponsors of the resulting business cases. They do not have to be convinced afterwards. They convince themselves during the journey.
Almost 25 years later, FORTH is used internationally by organisations and certified facilitators across sectors and cultures. What began as frustration became my life’s work: helping organisations turn innovation ambition into real business impact.
Radical innovation contains different kinds of uncertainty. Is the challenge strategically relevant? Do customers genuinely experience the problem? Can the team create original solutions? Does the market respond? Can the organisation implement the result?
The five FORTH stages systematically transform these uncertainties into five cumulative forms of trust.
The first stage establishes that the team is solving a strategically relevant challenge with the right people and sufficient commitment.
Decision-makers help formulate the innovation assignment. A multidisciplinary core team is selected, and the journey is prepared. Everybody gains confidence that the expedition matters and that its outcomes will be taken seriously.
The central question is: Are we solving the right strategic challenge with the right team and commitment?
The team goes outside and talks directly to customers and other stakeholders. It learns about their needs, frustrations, frictions and aspirations while exploring trends, technologies and inspiring business models.
The team may identify hundreds of customer frictions before selecting the most relevant opportunities. It is no longer working from internal assumptions. Direct evidence shows that the selected problems are genuine.
The central question is: Are we addressing real customer frictions and meaningful external opportunities?
The team generates hundreds of original ideas. The strongest are clustered into promising idea directions and developed into approximately twelve to eighteen concepts, depending on the group and assignment.
Participants often surprise themselves. They see that they can move beyond obvious incremental answers and create potentially radical concepts.
The central question is: Can we generate enough original and relevant solutions to make a real difference?
The team takes its concepts back to customers and relevant stakeholders. Rather than debating internally whether an idea might work, it asks the intended users.
Concepts are tested, challenged and improved. Some disappoint and are stopped. Others generate interest and demonstrate initial problem–solution fit.
The central question is: Do customers recognise the value, and is there credible evidence of a potential market?
This is not yet proof of commercial success. It is an essential move from internal opinion to external evidence.
The strongest validated concepts are connected to the organisation’s business reality. The team answers the questions radical ideas inevitably provoke:
The answers are brought together in mini new business cases. This creates internal trust: confidence that the concept is desirable, feasible, viable and relevant.
The central question is: Can our organisation credibly develop, support and implement this concept?
The five forms of trust build on one another:
| FORTH stage | Trust created | Uncertainty reduced |
|---|---|---|
| Full Steam Ahead | Strategic trust | Are we solving the right challenge? |
| Observe & Learn | Customer trust | Is the problem real and relevant? |
| Raise Ideas | Creative trust | Can we create original solutions? |
| Test Ideas | Market trust | Do customers recognise the value? |
| Homecoming | Internal trust | Can and should we implement it? |
But something else develops at the same time: ownership.
Participants helped formulate the assignment. They met customers, discovered frictions, generated ideas, created concepts, tested assumptions and built business cases. Nobody hands the result to them at the end. It is already theirs.
The five stages do not merely reduce uncertainty. They create trust—and trust built together becomes ownership.
Structured innovation is the fifth and integrating pillar. It brings innovation effectiveness, barrier-breaking, discipline and ownership together in one system.
A strategically anchored assignment prevents irrelevant innovation. Teams explore freely but select rigorously against the organisation’s intended direction and impact.
Innovation becomes more effective when organisations explore freely but choose strategically.
Customer validation then replaces assumptions with evidence, while mini new business cases connect customer desirability to feasibility, viability and internal commitment.
A pre-planned rhythm prevents postponement and loss of momentum. Customer evidence challenges automatic objections. Multidisciplinary collaboration breaks organisational silos. Participating decision-makers reduce the management buy-in barrier.
Instead of hearing “customers will never want this,” the team can show what customers said, what it tested and what it learned.
Evidence does not remove all uncertainty, but it makes uncertainty discussable and manageable.
Innovation discipline is the ability to continue purposefully despite uncertainty.
Every workshop has a purpose and every step creates a result. The team can see its progress: the assignment is clear, customer frictions have been discovered, concepts exist, tests are completed and business cases are taking shape.
Progress creates energy. The deliberate rhythm of divergence and convergence provides creative freedom when the team needs to explore and clear boundaries when it must choose.
Discipline keeps innovation moving after the excitement of the kick-off has disappeared.
Joint creation produces rational and emotional ownership.
Participants understand the evidence, criteria and business reasoning. They also care because they have invested their knowledge, creativity and identity. Decision-makers develop ownership for the same reason: they joined the expedition instead of judging it from the shore.
People support what they help create.
The final mini new business cases bring together strategic relevance, customer desirability, originality, market evidence, technical feasibility, business viability, internal capabilities and management commitment.
This is the complete five-pillar architecture:
| Innovation Authority pillar | How structured innovation incorporates it |
|---|---|
| Innovation Effectiveness | Select strategically relevant, validated and supported opportunities. |
| Breaking Innovation Barriers | Replace assumptions with evidence, break silos and involve decision-makers. |
| Innovation Discipline | Create a fixed rhythm, manageable steps and concrete deliverables. |
| Innovation Ownership | Let participants and leaders create the outcomes together. |
| Structured Innovation | Integrate all four in one journey from assignment to business case and impact. |
NTT DATA is Japan’s largest IT-services company and one of the largest IT-services providers in the world. Its Japanese operation wanted to evolve beyond building and delivering IT services based on customer requirements. It aimed to become an innovation partner for its clients.
That ambition exposed a recurring problem. According to Yuya Nishimura’s account in Breaking Innovation Barriers, many Japanese managers find the ambiguity of innovation and new-business development difficult to navigate. Japanese companies are internationally respected for continuous improvement and meticulous quality enhancement through small steps. Radical innovation, however, demands a much larger departure from today’s business.
Asking people to start with an empty sheet can create uncertainty and a creative block. Where should they begin? Which direction should they take? How can they explore ideas that might fail in a corporate culture where mistakes may carry a high personal cost?
FORTH makes the radical leap manageable.
NTT DATA’s clients had already participated in workshops and brainstorms based on Design Thinking. These produced some successes but also significant failures. Business-led consultancy approaches also disappointed when they lacked the ideas, participation and ownership of the clients’ own people.
Creativity without business grounding felt like building castles in the air. Business thinking without participation failed to create ownership.
NTT DATA therefore selected an innovation methodology using three criteria:
NTT DATA selected the FORTH Innovation Methodology because it combined all three.
NTT DATA challenged its clients with a simple question: why approach uncertain new-business development without establishing direction when even a conventional system-development project starts with a project charter?
The answer was the innovation assignment.
A strategically relevant assignment makes the journey purposeful. It attracts decision-makers because the challenge connects to their priorities and KPIs. Their participation then attracts strong people from across the organisation who want to contribute to an important goal.
Strategic relevance attracts decision-makers. Decision-makers attract strong participants. Strong participation improves outcomes and ownership.
NTT DATA used FORTH, together with its proprietary Business Design Sprint, to co-create new business models connected to the expected growth of electric vehicles.
Future customer behaviour, mobility ecosystems and viable business models were impossible to predict. The structured journey made those enormous questions manageable for the human mind.
The Business Design Sprint complemented FORTH by helping teams formulate and validate hypotheses, develop pitch decks and examine business viability. It helped land promising concepts in business reality.
Half of the core team came from NTT DATA and half from Honda. Trained NTT DATA facilitators guided the process, while NTT DATA consultants also participated as content contributors alongside their Honda colleagues.
The arrangement changed the traditional client–supplier relationship. NTT DATA did not innovate for Honda and present the answer afterwards. Both organisations created the concepts together.
The published case reported that the new electric-vehicle business concepts were still in development. We should therefore not claim completed commercial impact. The case demonstrates the creation of promising concepts, stronger collaboration, management buy-in and transferable innovation capabilities.
NTT DATA did more than adopt a method. It trained certified facilitators and created an internal ecosystem in which they shared stories, tools and lessons.
Different projects taught different lessons. Facilitating product innovation differs from facilitating services or business models. Government assignments differ from corporate ones. The subject, environment and participants influence the facilitator’s interventions.
By sharing these experiences, NTT DATA reduced dependence on the talent of individual consultants. The methodology became repeatable, transferable and continuously improvable.
This leads to an important lesson for large organisations:
Create an innovation facilitation capability, not an isolated innovation department.
An innovation department often creates innovations for the business units. An innovation facilitation capability helps people from the business units innovate themselves.
Facilitate innovation with the business units—not for them.
This keeps knowledge and ownership where implementation must eventually happen. Facilitators contribute process expertise and collaboration skills; participants contribute business knowledge, relationships and responsibility for results.
NTT DATA used structured innovation to make innovation more scalable and less dependent on individual talent. It created a repeatable way to add value for clients in Japan and potentially worldwide.
Innovation effectiveness is an organisation’s repeatable ability to turn innovation ambition into implemented solutions that create meaningful value.
It is not the number of ideas, workshops, prototypes or pilots. It is the organisation’s ability to move relevant opportunities towards implementation, adoption and impact.
I describe that journey in five words:
Understood. Accepted. Acted upon. Implemented. Impactful.
An idea that remains in a presentation or business case has not yet created innovation impact.
The effectiveness of the FORTH Innovation Methodology was independently studied by Professor Dr Herman van den Bosch of the Open Universiteit in the Netherlands.
The research examined FORTH applications in ten organisations across three countries. Nineteen managers and project leaders were interviewed about projects conducted between 2007 and 2013.
The results reported on the current FORTH website are:
The market-introduction result is the basis for stating that FORTH approximately doubles innovation effectiveness. The rise from 37.5% to 68% is not an exact mathematical doubling, but it is an improvement of more than 80%—a huge jump in the proportion of concepts reaching the market.
The 74% figure measures an earlier conversion point: nearly three-quarters of the mini new business cases received sufficient confidence and commitment to progress into development.
The 8.1 rating reflects the participants’ assessment of the process. They particularly valued its structured approach, the quality of the resulting business cases and its contribution to innovation culture.
No single workshop causes the improvement. FORTH combines five mechanisms:
FORTH cannot guarantee that every innovation will succeed. No credible methodology can. Markets change, technologies disappoint, priorities shift and implementation remains difficult.
What structured innovation can do is substantially improve the probability that strategically relevant, customer-validated and internally supported concepts reach implementation and impact.
The independent research provides the numerical evidence. The NTT DATA–Honda case helps explain why the mechanisms work—even in a conservative, risk-averse corporate context far removed from the environment where FORTH was created.
The content and facilitation style must respect local culture. But the underlying human needs cross cultures:
Structured innovation cannot be delegated entirely to an innovation team. Leadership behaviour determines whether the journey is strategically relevant, adequately resourced and capable of reaching implementation.
Do not ask people to “come up with something innovative.” Define a strategic challenge worth solving. The assignment must be focused enough to give direction and open enough to permit genuinely new answers.
If innovation matters, give it time during normal working hours. Block-book the workshops and decision moments before the kick-off. Do not expect employees to innovate between seven and nine in the evening after finishing their real jobs.
Decision-makers should participate at the consequential moments. They help formulate the assignment, experience customer insights, contribute ideas, support convergence and engage with the final cases.
Do not try to steer innovation only from the shore.
The CEO’s presence can legitimise the journey, but it can also silence the room. Leaders must follow the same rules as everyone else, including postponing judgement during divergence.
The facilitator must be able to treat the CEO like every other participant. Mature leaders understand their influence and ask to be corrected when they become too dominant.
Radical innovation will never be risk-free. Ask which assumptions were tested, what the team learned, which uncertainties remain and whether the expected value justifies accepting them.
Homecoming is not a ceremonial presentation. It is a real decision moment. Select the business cases with the greatest potential to realise the assignment and provide people, budget and protection for the next phase.
Avoid a cold handover. Keep participants from the original team involved so that customer understanding, creative intent and accumulated trust continue into development.
If a CEO says, “I support innovation, but I do not have time to participate,” my response is direct:
Then why should anybody else make time for it?
Leadership interest signals relevance. Leadership participation builds confidence. Leadership choices and resources turn confidence into action.
Your organisation probably lacks effective structure when:
You are developing effective structured innovation when:
Innovation begins in uncertainty. That does not mean it should begin in chaos.
The purpose of structure is not to predict the answer, control creativity or eliminate risk. Its purpose is to give people a reliable, psychologically safe and purposeful way to discover the answer together.
Start by choosing the island. Mark the route with buoys. Put the journey in the calendar. Give people practical templates. Let them diverge and converge. Go outside, learn, create, test and validate. Bring the strongest concepts home as business cases the organisation understands and owns.
Then the people who took all those manageable steps will look back and realise how far they have travelled.
They did not merely take a small step. Together, they made a radical jump.
The final lesson of the five Innovation Authority pillars is therefore simple:
Effectiveness is the goal. Barriers are what stop us. Discipline keeps us moving. Ownership makes us care. Structured innovation brings everything together—from idea to impact.
Uncertainty needs structure, while creativity needs freedom. Effective innovation provides both in one journey.
Structured innovation is a planned, purposeful and scheduled journey that generates and transforms ideas into impact through manageable steps, practical templates and concrete outcomes.
Not when it is designed well. Effective structure defines the assignment, rhythm, roles and deliverables while leaving teams free to explore customer needs, generate original ideas and adapt concepts. Structure guides creativity; it does not prescribe its content.
Structure helps the innovation team learn, decide and progress. Bureaucracy creates approvals, waiting, reporting or work that does not improve the outcome. Good structure enables people aboard the journey; bureaucracy tries to control them from the shore.
They are frequently isolated events without a clear assignment, scheduled follow-up, selection criteria, ownership or connection to implementation. Energy disappears when participants do not know what happens next.
Design Thinking is powerful for customer understanding, ideation and prototyping. Structured innovation connects those activities to strategic direction at the beginning and to validation, business cases, management commitment and implementation at the end.
FORTH focuses on the creative and customer-centred fuzzy front end: discovering opportunities, generating ideas, testing concepts and creating supported mini new business cases. Stage-Gate primarily governs projects from idea towards development and launch. FORTH can feed validated opportunities into a Stage-Gate portfolio.
The stages are Full Steam Ahead, Observe & Learn, Raise Ideas, Test Ideas and Homecoming. Together, they move from a strategically relevant assignment to tested, supported mini new business cases.
The complete preparation and journey covers approximately twenty weeks. Full Steam Ahead includes about five weeks of preparation and assignment formulation. Counted from the core-team kick-off to Homecoming, the expedition takes fifteen weeks.
A typical expedition produces four to six supported mini new business cases, tested and improved with customers and ready for management decision-making and further development.
Decision-makers gain confidence by experiencing the learning journey. They help frame the assignment, interpret insights, contribute ideas and engage with the resulting cases. They no longer need to be convinced at the end because they have developed ownership along the way.
Full Steam Ahead creates strategic trust, Observe & Learn creates customer trust, Raise Ideas creates creative trust, Test Ideas creates market trust and Homecoming creates internal trust.
Independent research reported that 68% of FORTH concepts reached the market compared with a 37.5% benchmark, while 74% progressed to development compared with 57%. Participants rated the process 8.1 out of 10. These results support the claim that FORTH substantially—and approximately twofold—increases innovation effectiveness, but they do not guarantee success for every project.
Yes, when facilitation respects the local culture and organisational context. FORTH has been applied across six continents and is available in fourteen languages. Its underlying principles—direction, collaboration, evidence, ownership and manageable progress—address universal organisational needs.
Build an innovation facilitation capability rather than expecting a central innovation department to innovate for the business. Train facilitators, share experience and help multidisciplinary teams from the business create and own their innovations themselves.
Choose a strategically important assignment, commit the right people, block the complete journey in their calendars, participate at crucial moments without dominating and provide resources for the strongest cases to progress into implementation.
Gijs turns this thinking into a keynote or a workshop, tailored to your audience. Four talks, each built for a different problem.
Winning management buy-in and turning approved ideas into action.
The FORTH roadmap: choosing the right opportunity before the team builds the wrong thing well.
Leading innovation when the map is out of date.
How great innovators see the opportunities others miss.
“A brilliantly articulated presentation full of passion, emotion and metaphors.”Ignacio Villoch · BBVA Innovation Centre, Spain
“Gijs creates an innovative mindset throughout the audience.”Anne-Laure Pardijon · Leadership Talent Programmes Manager, Airbus Group, France
Thirty to sixty minutes as a keynote, two to four hours as a workshop. Tell him the date, the audience and the format.
Gijs van Wulfen is an innovation keynote speaker, author and founder of the FORTH Innovation Methodology, helping organisations structure innovation and transform original ideas into real impact.
He is the author of several books on innovation, including The Innovation Expedition, The Innovation Maze and Breaking Innovation Barriers: Fifteen Strategies to Win Management Buy-In for Change. The FORTH Innovation Methodology was developed from his practical experience of leading innovation projects and is used by organisations and certified facilitators around the world.