It was a delight to work with [Rob] and would not hesitate to recommend [him] for a broad range of business support activities.

Innovation is fraught with complexity, uncertainty, and challenges. Who are our target customers? What are their needs, problems and motivations? What solution features are required to address these? How can we realise these features? How should we package these features within a product? What additional infrastructure and services are required to support our product? What is the optimum business-model? How should we position the company and product within the market? How should we sell and distribute the product? What are the optimum demand creation strategies? How should we scale the business?

Design sprints are focused periods of intense activity designed to tackle specific innovation challenges, answer key questions, or explore new ideas. To bring order to complexity, clarity to uncertainty, and solutions to challenges. To rapidly conceive, develop, and test the ideas and hypotheses that form the foundations of our innovation. 

Design sprints can be applied to achieve a wide range of business outcomes, such as solving complex problems, reducing risk, informing critical business decisions, discovering and testing new ideas, innovating business models, accelerating development, or maximising long-term innovation success.

In recent years, design sprints have proven to be highly effective innovation tools, driving:

• team engagement and alignment,
• focus and intensity of activity,
• efficient collaboration, knowledge sharing, and decision making,
• enhanced creativity and productivity,
• rapid problem solving,
• effective customer and stakeholder engagement, and
• long-term innovation culture.

The core principles of a design sprint are to:

• start with a specific customer or business challenge,
• understand and map this challenge,
• create, critique, and develop novel solutions,
• decide on a solution to be tested,
• rapidly build a prototype solution façade,
• use the prototype façade to test the problem-solution hypotheses with real customers,
• analyse the test results to either validate, refine, or reject the innovation hypotheses and ideas.

• A framework for developing robust innovation and business concepts
• An innovation roadmap - value creation by development phase