Challenge
What is worth improving?
Senior leaders set the important problems, opportunities and boundaries.
The decision
Is this important and clear enough to invite responses?
38thMove methods · Innovation
Innovation: from challenge to operation.
Turn strategic problems and promising ideas into governed tests, evidence-backed investment decisions and owned operational change.
Why it matters
AI creates more possibilities than any business can pursue.
Giving people an AI tool is easy. Choosing where it should change the business is harder.
Without a common route, ideas compete through enthusiasm, pilots drift without owners, and promising work gets stuck between experiment and everyday operation.
The answer does not need to be a large innovation department. It needs a simple way for people to contribute, for small tests to produce evidence, and for senior leaders to decide what to back, stop or change.
The five-stage route
Challenge → Spark → Test → Scale → Operate
Each stage answers a different question. The extra panel shows the decision needed before the work moves on.
Spark
What could we do differently?
People across the business bring ideas because they understand the work and its frustrations.
The decision
Is there enough value, ownership and evidence to shape a small test?
Test
Does it work well enough to matter?
Run the smallest useful test against a clear starting point and measure the result.
The decision
Stop, improve, test again or prepare to scale?
Scale
Can it work beyond the test?
Prove that the value survives the full cost of adoption, support, control and change.
The decision
Is the evidence strong enough to invest and extend?
Operate
Who owns it from now on?
Put the change into normal operation with an owner, support route and measures.
The decision
Continue, improve, return it to the process or retire it?
Stopping is not failure. A good process stops weak, unsafe or mistimed ideas before they absorb more time and money.
Who makes it work
Let everyone in. Keep the decisions clear.
The structure can be small. What matters is that people know how to contribute, who makes the decisions and who helps the work move.
People across the business
See what needs to improve.
The people closest to clients, projects and day-to-day work can see waste, delays and opportunities that a central team will miss. The process gives them a route to act on that knowledge.
Innovation Committee
Set direction and decide.
A small group of senior people agrees the challenges, chooses which tests and investments to back, and makes the difficult stop, hold, scale and ownership decisions.
Innovation Management Office
Make the process easy to use.
A small enabling team helps people shape ideas, organises the evidence, prepares decisions and keeps actions moving. It runs the process; it does not own every idea.
This does not need a large team, a heavy system or months of design. Start with a few clear challenges, a visible route for ideas and a regular decision meeting.
How the methods connect
Agentic Organisation branches from Spark or Test.
When a Spark or Test identifies a credible agentic Workflow, it can enter a specialist route: redesign the work first, then test how people, agents, data, controls and decisions should work together.
That route should return evidence, a non-agent alternative, a stop or hold decision, or a production-ready path. Innovation still owns the portfolio, funding, scale and operational-ownership decisions.
The innovation process itself can also be a useful first agentic Workflow. Agents can help shape ideas, find similar work, prepare decision packs and chase actions while people retain the consequential decisions.
Agentify the work around the decisions. Keep the decisions human.
A working method, adapted to context
Simple enough to start. Flexible enough to learn.
This is 38thMove's current working model, not a universal standard. The stages stay simple; the checks, evidence and decision rights should fit the size, risk and consequence of the work.
The test of the process is not how many ideas enter it. It is whether the business makes better decisions, learns faster and turns the right ideas into useful, owned change.