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Innovation QuickWin: Within, Adjacent, and Beyond

Within, Adjacent, and Beyond is about partnering: something that’s very critical to success with innovation today, to mitigate your risk and to share the reward.

Partnering is something that everyone talks about doing, but rarely gets creative about. We use a technique at futurethink called “Within, Adjacent , and Beyond,” and here’s how it works when it comes to partnering:

Sit down with your team and think about a product or service that could really use a partnership from the outside to really take it to the next level, and then think about “Within”. Who are the partners within your industry, even your competitors, that could take you to the next level?

Think of “Adjacent” – organizations adjacent to your industry, like technology providers or vendors, that you could partner with.

And then finally, “Beyond”. Who are the companies, or people, or organizations who are in industries completely unlike yours that you could consider partnering with to take you to a whole new level?

Using “Within, Adjacent, and Beyond” is a great approach to create partnerships for success.

By Lisa Bodell on February 7, 2012 at 1:56pm |

Comments

Submitted by Jerrold McGrath (not verified) on February 7, 2012 - 5:19pm.

Great article. I've struggle a lot with partnerships, particularly as they've often caused more grief than expected and I'm certain that this is a product of our own poor planning as opposed to any inherent issues with partnering. Seeing a methodology that espouses a simple way to ideate on partnerships (and provides some criteria for judging partnership requests) is quite useful. Thanks!

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