Last updated · 10 May 2026
Innovation Illustrated is the easy way to add a new dimension to your professional skill set. Through fifty annotated diagrams, it maps the anatomy of innovation work — the capabilities, the value chains, the processes and methods, and the data that flows between them — in a form you can absorb on a flight, on a commute, or across a weekend.
Designed to stand alone, it introduces a discipline, not a methodology; a shared vocabulary, not a doctrine. It is the book a business traveller picks up in an airport bookshop and finishes before landing — and returns to, years later, as the backbone of a serious practice.
Volume 1 opens the Innovation Lifecycle Framework at its source. Covering activities A1 through A5, it walks step by step through scanning, framing, customer and context research, solution-space exploration, and feasibility assessment — the work that separates organisations that notice change from those that are blindsided by it.
Every activity is presented with named roles, quality gates, and evidence requirements, so discovery work becomes a repeatable practice rather than an act of individual brilliance.
Volume 2 covers activities A6 through A8 — concept development, prototyping, and structured piloting. Innovation that survives discovery still has to be built, tested with real users, and refined through evidence rather than opinion.
Each delivery activity is treated as a disciplined sequence of hypothesis, build, test, and learn, with explicit quality gates that prevent teams from over-investing in unvalidated concepts or abandoning promising ones too early. Named roles, handoff protocols, and artefact templates turn delivery from heroic effort into repeatable craft.
Volume 3 addresses activities A9 through A11 — scaling, ecosystem partnership, and innovation ecosystem orchestration. The failure modes here are distinct from discovery and delivery: institutionalisation without ossification, partnership without loss of control, ecosystem participation without strategic drift.
Each activity is treated with the same step-by-step rigour as earlier volumes, with particular attention to the organisational, contractual, and governance mechanics that scale demands. Roles expand beyond the innovation team to include operations, legal, finance, and external partners, and the handoff choreography becomes correspondingly more deliberate.
Volume 4 covers the two element groups that make sustained innovation possible: the Innovation Management activities (I1–I5) that run the portfolio, measure performance, govern decisions, and cultivate capability; and the Supporting Business Functions (B1–B5) that provide strategy, finance, human resources, technology, and legal enablement.
The volume treats portfolio management, governance boards, innovation metrics, capability development, and cross-functional enablement with the same activity-level rigour as the discovery and delivery volumes — because governance that is not operationalised is merely aspiration.
Volume 5 is the deep-reference companion to Volumes 1–4. Where the activity volumes introduce methods at point of use with condensed summaries, Volume 5 provides the full treatment: origins and intellectual lineage, step-by-step application, known failure modes, tool ecosystems, worked examples, and empirical evidence of effectiveness.
Methods are organised by innovation-activity affinity and cross-referenced to every chapter in Volumes 1–4 where they appear, so practitioners can move fluidly between "what I need to do now" (activity volumes) and "how this method really works" (this volume).