Yellow Cat Blog

What's inside: Why and how we built this inside UK Government The framework itself: 5 core principles, 4 skill levels, and a Certified Coach pathway What disciplined entrepreneurship looks like for innovators, investors, and leaders Certification standards and assessment materials you can adapt and use Honest advice for building your own framework from scratch Here's how this started. When I was first asked to help a large Civil Service department build its capacity to delive

Introducing a new Innovation Skill Framework: 5 principles for disciplined entrepreneurship in practice Most organisations that say they want to innovate mean it. The problem isn't intent. It's that those same organisations rarely clearly define what innovating well actually looks like — what skills it requires, how you develop them deliberately, and how you know when someone is getting better at it. That gap is what the Innovation Skill Framework was built to close. I develo

Here’s the thing about most innovation roles: you’re responsible for driving change across an organisation, but you rarely have the authority to make anyone do anything. This article is about influence — specifically, the deliberate, strategic work of building a coalition of support around your innovation efforts.

If you can't demonstrate value early and consistently, you'll find yourself in a familiar trap: defending your team's existence instead of doing the work that justifies it. This article introduces two connected disciplines: measuring progress in ways that capture early value, and communicating that progress to keep stakeholders committed to what you're building.

Here's a mindset shift that's served me well: treat your innovation team like an internal startup. Startups rarely get their business model right the first time. They test, learn, pivot, and iterate. The model they launch with is almost never the model that eventually works. The same is true for innovation teams.

Through my work with organisations across sectors, I've identified three core orientations for innovation teams. Most successful teams have a primary orientation, even if they do some work in other areas.

If you're serious about building innovation capability, start with an honest assessment of where you stand… The organisations that succeed with innovation aren't the ones with perfect readiness scores. They're the ones honest enough to understand their starting point and smart enough to design an approach that fits.

The teams that succeed aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most talented people. They're the ones designed for their specific context, with clarity about their purpose and realistic support for their mission.

Failing to get traction for new ways of working or cultural changes you want your organisation to adopt? That’ll be corporate inertia....