How corporate entrepreneurs use design sprints to increase success

Innovation has become a top priority for many companies today. It is the solution to thwarting the risk and fear of being incumbent or getting taken over by a disruptor (the car industry is a painful example of this). The difficult task of helping companies to become more innovative falls on the shoulders of corporate entrepreneurs. However, they invariably have to weigh their options and maintain a constant balance between budget and time.

So, how do corporate entrepreneurs manage to move towards success? They use design sprints to place careful bets. Design sprints allow corporate entrepreneurs to manage the innovation risk of an idea and the budget required to invest. Typically, design sprints are a month-long track where you help corporate entrepreneurs validate the key assumptions of an idea. By the end of that month, corporate entrepreneurs know whether they have to kill an idea or obtain the necessary budget from management to pursue it further.

How does a design sprint help?

Alignment up front

A design sprint starts with alignment up front. It is important to clarify the scope, set the context, and ensure all necessary information is shared up front with the whole sprint team. This way, the team is aware of exactly what broad challenge they will be working on. Aligning teams helps the sprint start off on the right foot, and it is no secret that aligned teams have more success.

Setting the challenge

A design sprint is the ideal opportunity to take a risk or gamble. It is a low-effort investment, perfect for experimenting or increasing your innovation capacity. Whether an idea has potential or not is also made apparent quickly. In order to do this, start with the biggest hurdle: the challenge and assumptions that have to be validated. Begin by setting the challenge on the first day of the design sprint. Clarifying the challenges and opportunities (through the ‘How Might We’s) is crucial for the design sprint to succeed. Following this, define your 2 to 5-year ambition (Sprint Goal) by asking yourself what fundamental questions need to be answered (Sprint Questions). Your idea will not be validated if you skip these questions, as every step that follows is built upon them and serves the function of realising your ambition or answering these questions.

Fast idea generation

During a design sprint, ideas are generated at high speed. By aligning the team with the sprint’s context and challenge, all sprint team members can start generating and firing off ideas. This is great and you will be amazed by what teams can achieve in a short timeframe. These ideas are of such detail that one of them will be translated into a prototype.

Validation is key

No design sprint is without validation. After all, a defined challenge needs an answer. Design sprints are not slow processes with upfront research and progressive prototyping fidelity based on the outcome of validation. Instead, a design sprint gathers and aligns smart people so they can supply great ideas and assumptions. These assumptions are then translated into a prototype to be tested and validated. Design sprints prove to be quicker methods of testing and validating ideas, which in turn saves a lot of time and budget.

Concrete results

What you end up with is a very intensive track that leads to concrete results. At the end of the design sprint, ideas are translated into a tangible prototype and placed in front of an audience. The audience then provides feedback on the prototype, so you end up with concrete points to take through to the next phase. We always follow up design sprints with at least an iteration week so you can get the best results out of it. One week is often just not enough and by learning from the feedback, improving the prototype and putting it in front of users again, you get a much more actionable result.

Fine-tuning the process

Corporate entrepreneurs that are used to running design sprints can fine-tune the process and find hacks to make everything run quicker. This is the greatest benefit of running a design sprint internally with an experienced team. By running more and more design sprints, the process grows increasingly efficient and improves the outcome’s success.