In short: an innovation funnel starts with many teams and step by step reduces the number of teams. An innovation funnel has one or several teams working in parallel but without a reduction process.

What the experts say

Alexander Osterwalder shared in a short post why many innovation processes are broken and why we should work with a funnel approach instead of a tunnel approach.

We should think of internal innovation processes as a funnel where we start with many teams that invest a little time. And the more we advance in time, the fewer there are teams working, but the more they invest time.

At each stage of the funnel, we stop a certain number of teams from continuing to stop the risk of working on stuff that won’t work or doesn’t bring value.

In a tunnel innovation mode, you give one or a few teams more time. So there is an expectation to succeed instead of an expectation to fail. And people spend a lot of time working on an idea instead of just enough time.

My two cents

Another way to look at it instead of having a funnel with many teams at the start of the process and one at the end is to have one team made of very diverse people but that has to work on many different ideas to then land on one or zero projects at the end (finishing with nothing is also a good result).

This might be smart especially in organizations where it’s hard to get many different teams on board.

So a funnel would be something like this:

• 6 people investing one week to come up with 10 ideas and test them

• 6 people investing another week to improve 5 of those ideas

• 6 people investing another week on 2 ideas

• Etc.

Each time we reduce the number of ideas to work on but we have more time for each idea. It’s like a double funnel where on one aspect you reduce and on the other you develop.