Powerful tool to manage innovation
All Templates
Worksheets Futures Thinking
1_Horizon Scanning
What you can do with the tool:
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Spots emerging trends and weak signals before they become mainstream.
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Shifts from merely reacting to current events to proactively anticipating them.
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Broadens the team's perspective and challenges assumptions about what's possible.
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Gathers raw material that feeds directly into tools like Pattern Recognition.
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Builds a dynamic, ongoing awareness of the external environment.
2_Stakeholder Analysis
What you can do with the tool:
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Determines which stakeholders have the greatest influence on an outcome.
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Identifies overlooked actors, including non-human and future stakeholders.
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Maps the network of relationships, power dynamics, and dependencies.
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Anticipates conflicts and surfaces opportunities for collaboration.
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Creates a foundation for solutions that account for the whole system.
3_PESTLE
What you can do with the tool:
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Provides a structured framework for a comprehensive environmental scan.
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Clarifies the external context your challenge or organization operates in.
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Identifies major drivers that could create future opportunities or risks.
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Gathers signals that feed into tools like Pattern Recognition and the Probability/Impact Matrix.
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Ensures the team looks beyond its own area of expertise.
4_Unconscious Bias
What you can do with the tool:
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Builds awareness of the biases that shape your interpretation of signals and data.
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Fosters a more inclusive, objective team environment.
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Enables more conscious, fairer decisions about the future.
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Improves empathy work by recognizing how your own biases color your understanding of others.
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Lays the groundwork for a more thorough, less distorted analysis.
5_Ladder of Inference
What you can do with the canvas:
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Visualizes the invisible mental steps from data to action.
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Pinpoints exactly where assumptions and bias enter your thinking.
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Resolves disagreements by tracing conclusions back to their source data.
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Improves strategic conversations by grounding them in facts rather than beliefs.
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Fosters a culture of clear thinking within the team.
6_Causal Layered Analysis
Was du mit dem Canvas machen kannst:
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Goes beyond symptoms to identify the root causes of complex challenges.
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Uncovers the worldviews and myths that limit conventional thinking.
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Develops deeper future scenarios that challenge the status quo.
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Identifies deeper leverage points for lasting, meaningful change.
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Fosters a more holistic, systemic understanding of a problem.
7_Scenario Planning
What you can do with the canvas:
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Identifies the critical uncertainties that will shape the future.
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Challenges the "official" future and uncovers blind spots.
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Develops resilient strategies that can later be stress-tested.
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Communicates complex future possibilities in a compelling narrative form.
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Creates a shared language for strategic conversations about change.
8_Probability / Impact
What you can do with the canvas:
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Systematically assesses a wide range of possible future events.
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Distinguishes strategically critical issues from merely interesting ones.
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Creates a clear, visual map for prioritizing risks and opportunities.
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Builds team alignment on where attention and resources should go.
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Provides a rational basis for deeper foresight work.
9_Pattern Recognition
What you can do with the canvas:
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Turns a chaotic collection of signals into coherent, underlying patterns.
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Reveals systemic shifts that aren't visible from any single signal.
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Shifts from merely collecting data to generating real foresight.
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Builds a solid foundation for tools like Causal Layered Analysis and Scenario Planning.
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Builds a shared understanding of the key dynamics shaping the future.
Worksheet Measuring 101
1_North Star Metric(s)
What you can do with the canvas:
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Supports cause and effect exploration and documents the leading and lagging metrics contributing to the North Star.
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Builds the measurement system based on the core principles of quantifiability, alignment with strategy and a larger vision.
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Helps avoid vanity metrics and define actionable and easy-to-understand metrics.
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To be adapted to the respective industry and focus, for example on the breadth, depth or frequency of customer/user loyalty in the area of digital offers.
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Helps align activities and work to be done and tasks with the North Star.
2_Minimum Viable Metrics
What you can do with the canvas:
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Accompanies the cultural change towards a new and changed innovation measurement system.
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A set of minimum viable exploration metrics helps to define meaningful leading indicators.
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The canvas supports in answering the central questions regarding the reasons for the measurement, the target group and potential activities to be derived from it.
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The minimum viable exploration metrics support an iterative and step-by-step approach to the measurements and form the framework for a meaningful measurement system.
3_Health Metrics Canvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Measures the pulse of the organization with the most important ones"Health" metrics.
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Reflects existing KPIs and selects the metrics that are already actively measuring the "pulse".
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Helps to develop new metrics and to check whether concrete measures can be derived from them.
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Documents the origin of the data for the measurement and determines average values and deviations.
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Sets a measurement period (e.g. daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly).
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Determines who is the addressee and who is responsible for the respective health metric.
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Focuses on the top 5-7 metrics in the exploit.
4_5Ps Creativity Canvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Takes up the most important aspects for measuring creativity.
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Supported with the appropriate questions for reflection and definition of activities analogous to the divergent and convergent design activities.
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Supports the documentation of various goals of measuring creativity, such as building new skills.
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Focuses on the "WHY" in relation to the person and the team, with explorations of curiosity, purpose, knowledge and reflection, and then expands on process, place, persuasion, and the product.
5_Basic AI CaNvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Provides a simple structure to first describe the business or prediction problem to be solved, before discussing the relevant elements of prediction, action, and input.
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Use key questions to help understand what knowledge is required for decision making, how to evaluate different outcomes and failures, and what actions are triggered by the outcomes.
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Documents what data is needed to train the prediction algorithm and how the results are used to improve the algorithm.
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Particularly helpful for AI applications and applications in a business context.
6_Innovation Funnel
What you can do with the tool:
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Documents and Quantifies all activities from problem creation to scaling solutions.
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Distinguishes between incremental improvements based on today's customer needs and more radical innovations for tomorrow's customer needs.
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Shows the progress of design challenges over time and documents the validation of customer issues over time.
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Helps to keep the risks under control and withstand the sales and profit expectations in the medium to long term.
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Periodically reviews and documents innovation initiatives and progress.
Worksheets Objectives & Key Results 201
1_OKR Cheat Sheet
What you can do with the tool:
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Puts the customer at the center of the considerationsfor formulating the Objectives & Key Results.
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Explains a simple procedure for exploring and documenting the knowledge gained and customer feedback.
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Supports with examples the structure andIdentification of metrics and indicators,which on the one hand predict success (leading) and on the other hand show the effect (lagging).
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Provides information on quantifying the key results.
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Evaluates with the team the confidence level for the measurement.
2_Envision OKR Canvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Supports brainstorming and documents possible goal, purpose and first ideas for leading and lagging indicators.
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Provides three starting points for imagining the future based on the questions: "What if...", "Imagine that...", and "How might we..."
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The "What if..." question helps to leave the existing frame and open up to something new.
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The "Imagine that... statement" helps in focus, approximation and creation of action and makes an idea seem real.
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The question "How might we..." offers an excellent starting point to define a first problem statement.
3_Collaboration Canvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Supports the teams in the creation phase of the OKRs.
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Documents important cornerstones of the cooperation.
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Synchronizes different levels of measurement (e.g. team and individual OKRs)
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Forces a discussion about the purpose and possible effects.
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Enables transparency about the measurement as well as about the skills of the team members.
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Includes the values and expectations of the cooperation to be defined.
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Clearly regulates the responsibilities of team members in relation to goals, measurement, and reporting.
4_Moonshot/Everest Canvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Breaks down the vision into achievable and prioritizable missions if required by the complexity of the project.
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Supports to carry out initial planning for moonshots/Everest Objectives, which usually have a planning horizon of 2, 3 or more years.
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Breaks down tasks and at the same time reflecting on whether the team and the organization have the skills to do so.
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Assess external support to align and execute prioritized tasks.
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Checking dependencies on other strategic directions and initiatives.
5_Cluster Success Criteria
What you can do with the tool:
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Get an overview of each mission and highlight what success means for each mission.
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Supports discussion, brainstorming, and clustering of success criteria.
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Prioritizes success criteria per mission and at the same time creates transparency about the projects and activities.
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Creates transparency and the basis for communicating OKRs.
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Encourages discussion on the best use of resources (eg, how much time and effort is required, what skills are needed, and what are possible obstacles to completing the job).
6_OKR Documentation
What you can do with the tool:
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Records and documents the most important parameters for defining the key results.
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Provides a defined structure for describing a key result
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Answers the four most important questions related to:
- What end date?
- What result?
- What progress?
- How is it measured? -
Documents at the same time the Vision/ North Star, the strategic goals and/or the prioritized tasks, as well as the type and the applied scoring system.
7_Skills & Capabilities
What you can do with the tool:
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Provides an overview of the skills that already exist in the team and which are necessary to carry out each individual mission.
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Starts with the crucial question, which skills are crucial for starting a specific task.
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Creates a basis for deciding whether to use existing resources in the organization or purchase from external suppliers and service providers.
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Supports planning roughly in the phases of understanding, realizing, implementing and lead.
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Helps to initiate planning for new skills and abilities if they are needed on a recurring basis.
8_Mobilize & Communication
What you can do with the canvas:
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Prepares the communication of the OKRs and helps to mobilize the teams.
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Used to attract talent within the organization for the innovation project.
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Supports the goal of making the problem to be solved or the desired objective as transparent as possible.
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Shows which critical assumptions are to be tested and which key results are used for measurement.
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Provides the opportunity to make the source of funds and the financing mechanisms transparent.
9_Redefine OKRs Canvas
What you can do with the canvas:
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Documents progress of the initiative and make adjustments accordingly.
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Supports the check-ins with a clear structure and an outline that goes from rough to detailed.
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Provides the basis for reflecting on whether the outcome really inspires the team to take appropriate action, and to check that progress is measurable and provides good evidence.
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Helps in the development of bases for measures and the creation of an action plan.
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Forces a discussion about current and future obstacles.
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Distinguishes between solvable problems and facts to be accepted.
Worksheets Data-Driven Innovation 301
1_Data-Ideation
What you can do with the canvas:
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Uses data science tools and methods at various stages of the design cycle to accelerate and validate activities in exploring the problem and solution space.
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Supports the approach of integrating existing and new data points via the hybrid design cycle (Discover, Create, Deliver) with the appropriate questions.
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Inspires and enables, for example, innovation teams to identify customer/user needs based on traditional ethnographic research while incorporating insights from other data sources or AI-generated insights about specific customer/user preferences.
2_Data Ethics
What you can do with the canvas:
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Asks the appropriate questions regarding the use of data in terms of legal regulations and ethics.
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Helps to define the principles that support the hybrid innovation teams and each individual team member to adhere to the framework of agreed values and ethics.
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Addresses typical topics in relation to data protection up to the preservation of human values (in the respective cultural environment).
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Considers data sources and rights, as well as use of data.
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Critically reflects on how to avoid negative impacts throughout the design cycle.
3_Design Thinking for AI
What you can do with the canvas:
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Supports the respective teams in documenting the results of iterations and data exploration.
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Uses tools and methods from the design thinking, hybrid and AI toolbox.
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Divides the tasks into customer needs (Needs), the approach pursued (Approach), and the advantages and added values of the AI solution (Benefits).
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Integrates the principles from the Ethical Considerations.
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Mostly focuses on the typical use cases in the context of design thinking for AI: Data collection, measurements or enhanced experiences for the customer/user.
4_Customer Journey - AI
What you can do with the tool:
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Identifies AI potentials in the AS-IS customer journey and for a specific use case.
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Helps to work out real added value from AI solutions and shows where the customer experience and interaction is positively influenced.
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Documents the reflection of the needs of the user/customer, as well as the goals and expectations of the AI solution.
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Applies, for example, a typical customer journey in the purchasing process from the customer’s point of view, from raising awareness, through the decision, to the recommendation.
5_Data Source
What you can do with the tool:
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Provides structure in identifying the relevant data sets for the AI solution and a distinction between the data source and the way it is used for the specific scenario or customer/user experience to be (re)designed.
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Allows, through a predefined grid, to examine all dependencies related to the data requirements.
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Best combined and applied along with the Data Ideation Template and the Data Ethics Canvas to complete or validate the data source template.
6_Neurodesign Project
What you can do with the canvas:
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Helps design thinking and innovation teams agree on the initial assumptions in a neurodesign project, prepare the experiment setup, and document the results.
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Initially focuses on empathy with the user/customer based on ethnographic research.
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Develops critical assumptions as a basis for the experimental neuroscience project.
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Supports the selection of measurement tools and the documentation of the results.
Discover More Templates
1_Design thinking tools
50 additional templates for Design Thinking are available in "The Design Thinking Toolbox".
2_Ecosystem Design Tools
20 additional templates for the "Ecosystem Design" lens are available in the book "Business Ecosystem Design."