The ADOPTS process uncovers new opportunities that support a company's strategic intentions and creates compelling solution concepts that address these opportunities in ways that create new high growth businesses. The process is depicted in the following diagram. The process takes as input strategic domains identified as areas into which the organization believes it should, and can, expand. The output of the process are Business Hypotheses ready for New Product development (NPD).


A process defines the times, places and actions that result in predicted outcomes. The ADOPTS innovation process defines:

• Times - when to act and how long to act
  
• Places - where the knowledge resides
• Actions - how to obtain the knowledge and what to do with it

The manifestations of the process are actual projects implemented with a plan of action. An innovation process, and its corresponding projects and plans, constitute the mechanism whereby individuals and organizations innovate.

This model of the innovation process is informed by the theory of innovation, and provides a view of the components of innovation and their relationships. Any model is necessarily an abridgment of reality. The value of a model lies in its ability to achieve results manifested in the processes, tools and practices derived from the model. A Model is a view of reality. No one model is definitive, every model is biased. It is useful to have a number of models that present reality through different 'lenses'. This model shows the two poles of innovation – community and technology – represented as forces that drive the front-end process and that must be managed.

All components of the ADOPTS process are based on a comprehensive theory of innovation and contain the methods, techniques and tools of implementation. These are:

• Domain Definition
• Opportunity Discovery
• Solution Creation
• Option Development
• Community Building
• Technology Deconstruction
  

Together these comprise the means of implementing the ADOPTS innovation process.

In the middle is the essence of any innovation process - the development of new knowledge that drives the evolution of all innovative endeavors. Both technology knowledge and community knowledge start at the left of the diagram with the essence or true nature of a technology and its effects and how they are valued by individuals in a community. At the beginning, all of the tangible manifestations – the product, the market – are stripped away and the fundamental forces of innovation are laid bare.

• Technology essence – the change in nature and what it causes
• Community essence – the change in action and the reaction to change

This essence is, by its nature, abstract and intangible. It is difficult to understand and even harder to value. It is, however, the basis from which all value flows and it leads to informed approaches to create hypotheses, tests and knowledge development necessary to achieve true innovation.

To the right of the Knowledge Creation arrow are the tangible manifestations of technology and community, the product and the market, that a rigorous new product development (NPD) process requires. These are the concrete entities that create value in the real world. As such, they are easy to describe, view, and test. They are also expensive to create and getting them ‘right’ is a goal that is so difficult to achieve.

In between the very beginning and the NPD pipeline are the dynamic actions of the Innovation process that drive innovation. It is an evolutionary process because, properly conceived and executed; both technologies and communities behave much as if they were being shaped by evolutionary forces under the control of the innovators. It is from these forces that the process of innovation emerges.

The Innovation Process starts with the nascent technologies and communities from which a whole world of possibilities can be conceived. As these possibilities are expressed, either physically or conceptually, they are selected based on survival of the fittest. These ‘fittest’ can then emerge to adapt to specific environments and grow exponentially with little or no competition.

Inovo’s model of the innovation process is distinctive for several reasons. Foremost is the recognition of Community as the key conceptual principle of the needs/desires side of innovation’s essence. Community is a much more powerful concept than ‘Market’ or ‘Customer’ since it encompasses both of these concepts and yet goes beyond them to include areas where markets or customers do not yet exist. The techniques used for forming, nurturing, recruiting, and stewarding communities are different than the market research techniques used for markets and customers. In fact in the nascent stage markets and customers don’t even exist!

The Innovation process is itself comprehensive, organized, detailed and actionable. It covers all aspects of innovation and enables critical thinking and detailed planning at every step.

The Innovation Process is non-linear, dynamic and evolutionary in nature, the way innovation occurs in the real world. The process, shown in the preceding diagram, breaks the development of technologies and communities into Nascent, Expressed and Adaptive stages corresponding to the evolutionary state of the entities. The Innovation process directs activities, illuminates what needs to be done, accelerates the creation of value and provides the structure, discipline, organization and rigor necessary for practices that can be taught and learned. These activities are codified in the tools and practices that implement the Innovation process.