Next Cycle overview

How the Next Cycle's five stages and their steps work, and how an Innovation Opportunity moves through them.

The Next Cycle is the innovation framework used in SolveNext Lab. It describes the path an Innovation Opportunity takes, from the first idea to a mature, growing solution. Every new opportunity is placed in the Next Cycle automatically.

Why it matters

Knowing exactly where each opportunity is helps you pick the right activities, drills and experiments. It also lets you compare the progress of all your opportunities.

Key concepts

Stages: the cycle has five stages, always in this order:
- Formulate: define the vision and goals and discover the pain points worth solving.
- Incubate: generate, prototype and prioritize solution hypotheses, and test whether they are wanted, doable and worth it.
- Accelerate: define, build, test and deploy a minimum viable solution (MVS) and prepare the launch.
- Operate: define and monitor indicators, learn and adjust.
- Grow: expand to new constituents, markets, models and partners.
Steps: each stage contains ordered steps. For example, Formulate has Vision and Purpose, Goals, Strategy, Pain Hypothesis Discovery, Prioritize and Wanted?.
Current position: each opportunity has one current stage and one current step. New opportunities start at Formulate, step Vision and Purpose.
Hypotheses by stage: each new hypothesis is tagged with the opportunity's current stage, so the Full report can group your learning by stage.

Where to find it

Open an Innovation Opportunity. The Next Cycle bar is under the header:

The cycle name ("Next Cycle") is shown on the left, with an info icon that plays an explanation video.
Each stage is shown in order. Completed stages show Done, and the active stage shows the current step name.
Under each stage, a row of small segments represents its steps. The current step is highlighted. Hover over a segment to see the step name.
Click a step segment to move the opportunity to that step, or click a stage name to move to the first step of that stage.
The Advance with AI button opens the AI assistants, which can suggest the right stage and step for your opportunity.

The stage and step are also shown in the Stage (Step) column on the Portfolios page.