A Practical Guide: Combining Strategy & Innovation

Using the IISW and the Integrity-Driven Innovation Canvas Together

1. Introduction: The Architect and the Designer

The Logos Ethica framework contains two powerful master-level toolkits for shaping the future of your business: the Integrated Impact Strategy Workshop (IISW) and the Integrity-Driven Innovation Canvas. To use them effectively, it's helpful to think of them as the Architect and the Designer.

• The IISW is the Architect. It's a top-down, leadership-driven process to create the high-level blueprint for the entire organization—your purpose, vision, and core strategic pillars. The architect's job is to ensure the structure is sound, the foundation is solid, and that all the major rooms are in the right place to serve the overall purpose of the building. The output is a coherent and robust strategic plan.

• The Innovation Canvas is the Designer. It's a bottom-up, creative process used by a team to design a specific, innovative solution—a new product, service, or process—that fits within the architect's blueprint. The designer's job is to take the purpose of a specific room and turn it into a beautiful, functional, and inspiring space. The output is a single, brilliant, and well-defined concept.

A great strategy needs innovative ideas to bring it to life, and great ideas need a clear strategy to ensure they are focused on the right problems. This guide will show you how to use these two toolkits together in a powerful, virtuous cycle.

2. The Primary Pathway: From Strategy to Innovation

This is the most common and recommended sequence for using the two toolkits. It provides a clear, logical flow from high-level vision to a concrete, actionable idea, ensuring that your most creative work is focused on your most important strategic priorities.

• Step 1: The Architect Sets the Direction (Using the IISW).
  The senior leadership team undertakes the Integrated Impact Strategy Workshop. This is a crucial, high-stakes process of alignment where the team agrees on a shared diagnosis of their situation and a unified vision for the future. The key output is a new strategic plan with 3-5 clear Strategic Pillars.

• Step 2: Leadership Issues a Creative Mandate.
  Based on the new strategy, a senior leader charters a cross-functional team with a specific mission that is linked to one of the new pillars and one of the company's core values. A great mandate provides both focus ("This is the problem we need you to solve") and freedom ("We want you to be creative in how you solve it").

• Step 3: The Design Team Creates the Solution (Using the Innovation Canvas).
  The chartered team uses the Integrity-Driven Innovation Canvas to provide a structure for their creative process. The canvas guides them from a deep, empathetic understanding of a stakeholder's needs to a well-defined, values-aligned innovative idea that fulfills the creative mandate.

3. A Practical Guide: When and How to Use the Innovation Canvas

The Integrity-Driven Innovation Canvas is a specialized tool for creative problem-solving. It should not be used for every strategic pillar. It is most powerful when a pillar requires a creative breakthrough, not just operational execution.

When to use the Innovation Canvas:

• For Transformation: When you need to create a new business model or fundamentally change your relationship with a stakeholder.

• For Innovation: When you need to design a new product, service, or major feature.

• For "Wicked Problems": When you need to tackle a persistent, complex stakeholder frustration that doesn't have a simple fix.

How to select the right Pillar and Value:

1. Select the Strategic Pillar: Choose a pillar from your IISW output that requires new thinking and is not a simple execution task.

2. Select the Core Value as Your "Creative Lens": Choose the core value that provides the most powerful and relevant perspective for looking at the problem defined by the pillar. Ask yourself: "Which of our values, when used as a lens, would force us to see this problem in a completely new way?"

4. Case Studies in Action: Applying the Methodology

Here are the three case studies from the Integrated Impact Strategy Workshop, showing how to apply this methodology in practice.

Case Study 1: InnovateFast

• Strategic Pillar: "Win Through Trust & Transparency." This is a transformational goal that requires new, creative solutions beyond just executing better.

• The Right Value Lens: "Customer Obsession." This value forces the team to ask, "What would an act of profound obsession with our customers' trust look like?" This is a more powerful creative prompt than a generic value like "Integrity."

• The Resulting Innovation: The "Transparent Pricing Calculator," a specific, creative idea that directly serves the strategic pillar, viewed through the lens of the chosen value.

Case Study 2: Veridian Plastics

• Strategic Pillar: "Partner for the Future." This is a vague, relational goal that requires a creative breakthrough to make it concrete.

• The Right Value Lens: "Customer Loyalty." This value forces the team to ask, "What would an act of true loyalty to our customers look like in this new, sustainable world?" This question reframes the relationship from transactional to strategic.

• The Resulting Innovation: The "Sustainable Solutions Consulting Group," an innovative new service model that transforms the company from a simple supplier into an indispensable partner.

Case Study 3: Terra

• Strategic Pillar: "Pioneer a Scalable Impact Model." This is a fundamental business model innovation challenge.

• The Right Value Lens: "Stakeholder-First." This value forces the team to ask the difficult question, "How can we create a model that serves all our stakeholders—our farmers, our employees, and our new mass-market customers—at scale?"

• The Resulting Innovation: The "Terra Two-Tier Model" with the "Partnership Dividend," a sophisticated business model innovation that resolves the core tension between "purity" and "impact."