Beyond Big Ideas: Strategies for Continuous Innovation - Zsófi Herendi (Talk Outline)

A ~90-minute hands-on, interactive workshop at Craft 2025 (Budapest), late on a Friday afternoon, by Zsófi Herendi, product manager at Tesco Technology and a “visual thinker” who has brought business people and developers together for 20+ years. She founded the Domain-Driven Design Hungary meetup, co-founded the Virtual DDD community/meetup (7 years old), and runs hands-on sessions at DDD conferences. Her passion: making complex things feel simpler and building real shared understanding (not the illusion of it) — which led her to DDD ~8 years ago. Thesis: innovation is not a single genius idea but a repeatable process of tools and habits — first gain situational awareness inside the box (Business Model Canvas), then step outside the box (ideation techniques) to cross the borders in your mind. Attendees work at tables with flip charts, pens, pogácsa, and Tesco candies; an online Miro board mirrors the exercises for the streamed audience. Structure: the problem (false agreement) → business-model basics → Exercise 1 (map a canvas) → the Lean Startup additions → maturity levels → why innovation matters → disruption patterns → Exercise 2 (escape thinking) → Exercise 3 (disruption cards) → takeaways.

1. The Problem: False Agreement

1.1 The painful experience

• Every new quarter a road map arrived, and the engineering team asked: why are we building this? what problems does it solve? who are the struggling users?
• As the PM she “had no answers or very vague answers” — she had road-map items and Jira/Aha tickets, but not the reason behind the whole thing.
• Priorities came down from leadership as “aligned with strategic goals / market expectations” — true, but no detailed answer; the team was frustrated, and so was she.

1.2 The real risk

• The biggest risk isn’t disagreement — it’s false agreement: thinking you understand each other when you have no idea.
• Aside: “Please don’t write a piece of code without knowing why you are doing that” — for engineers, PMs, anyone in software.

1.3 The fix she found

• The Business Model Canvas, a visual tool, helped her develop real shared understanding: it forces you to verbalize what seems obvious but isn’t, with “just enough structure” to think together.
• She began using it as a launchpad — not just for shared understanding, but for innovation.

2. Business Model Basics

2.1 What a business model / canvas is

• A business model = how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.
• The Business Model Canvas: a visual tool with nine sections, invented in 2008 by Alexander Osterwalder; maps any business, smallest to largest.
• Her mindset shift: she’d thought it was only for mapping whole companies, but it works perfectly for new feature sets / any context a team works in.

2.2 BMC vs. Lean Startup Canvas

• Lean Startup Canvas — better for mapping new ideas from scratch (hence “startup”).
• Business Model Canvas — better for existing businesses you already know how to deliver value with; used today to ideate on strategic direction.
• Templates are available online (e.g., Miro).

2.3 The nine sections (via a Netflix example)

• 1. Customer segments (most important, mapped first): who you deliver value for — consumers of entertainment (individuals, families, students), independent filmmakers, production houses/studios.
• 2. Value proposition: unlimited on-demand, ad-free movies/TV/documentaries; global distribution; revenue sharing; exposure to millions of viewers.
• 3. Channels: where they get the value — Netflix website, mobile app, streaming devices, smart TVs.
• 4. Customer relationship: how you stay top-of-mind and handle problems — community forums, personalized recommendations.
• 5. Revenue streams: how you make money — subscription fees, licensing/distribution.
• 6. Key activities (the blue internal-organization part): content production, licensing/distribution, platform development.
• 7. Key resources: technology, content library, the (strong) Netflix brand.
• 8. Key partners: people/organizations without whom you couldn’t deliver the value.
• 9. Cost structure: content production/licensing, technology/infrastructure, marketing/distribution.
• The numbered order is Osterwalder’s recommended fill order and “tells a story,” but real life doesn’t always follow it.

2.4 What users say about the canvas

• Feedback she’s gathered: it creates shared understanding, sparks insights and generates new ideas, triggers questions, and forces structured thinking.
• Osterwalder’s own biggest learning: it “goes beyond the blah blah blah” — it forces “what do you mean by that?” → real shared understanding.

3. Exercise 1 — Map a Canvas (25 min)

• After a quick self-intro within each group, pick a business / context / domain / project you work on (or even someone’s company in the group) — “it works for everything.”
• Sketch the canvas and fill it in following the numbered order (or let the conversation flow), using the guideline questions in the exercise-helper doc; the conversations are the most valuable part.
• Suggested timing: 15 minutes for boxes 1–4/5, then 10 minutes for the rest; she uses an old-school kitchen timer (and a “fancy Tesco bell” she forgot to ring).

4. Her Personal Blend: Adding Lean Startup Elements

She doesn’t use the BMC strictly — she mixes in Lean Startup Canvas fields she found missing. She used this on her own (a mild “anti-pattern”) to learn the retail domain after joining Tesco last October, coming from ~15 years in fintech.

4.1 Problem statement

• Even a 20-year-old business must answer what problems it solves.

4.2 Unfair / competitive advantage

• What is your advantage competitors can’t easily copy?

4.3 Existing alternatives

• How would customers solve the problem without you? — “very interesting to map out.”

4.4 Early adopters

• The customer segment that first used your solution — for an old business, often your most important customers.

4.5 Metrics (what she missed most)

• How do you tell if your solution is successful? You must specify the metrics that say it works.

4.6 High-level concept

• A high-level sketch of what the solution looks like.
• She’s building this blended template in Miro and will share the presentation.

5. The Four Maturity Levels of Business Modeling

5.1 Level 1 — Checklist

• Filling in the fields / answering the questions in each box (today’s level).

5.2 Level 2 — Story

• Understanding the connections between pieces and telling the story of the business by following the order.

5.3 Level 3 — Patterns

• Understanding business-model dynamics by mapping others’ models and asking what they did differently / why they succeed.

5.4 Level 4 — Evolution

• Experimenting with different business models — figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

5.5 The one takeaway

• “Never start anything without visualizing and understanding the context.”
• Echoes Simon Wardley’s morning talk (gain situational awareness first) and Dan North’s point the day before about shared understanding (“everyone knows what everyone knows”) as the desired team state.
• Without it, “you build blind.”

6. Why Innovation Matters

6.1 The failure statistic

• A study of 300 failed-startup autopsies found ~20% failed because of a wrong business model.

6.2 Crisis as accelerator

• You “sometimes just cannot continue having what you had before” (not only the pandemic).
• Companies that used crises (e.g., the pandemic) as an accelerator did so not by foreseeing them, but because they had processes/practices in place and were always experimenting (Level 4 evolution).

6.3 Exploit and explore — no Chinese wall

• Run exploiting the current model (situational awareness) and exploring new models in parallel — no wall between them — to be prepared for any crisis.

6.4 Against the “project mindset”

• Leadership tends to believe it can pick the winning idea, creating a project mindset (start/end dates, deadlines, success/failure).
• Instead, with innovation/ideation processes in place, let the team/company evolve and generate many ideas, then decide among hundreds — don’t have leadership pick one upfront.

6.5 The CEO fear

• 74% of CEOs fear new entrants disrupting their business model — but you can’t just sit and wait; innovation is about processes and tools, done in daily life with curiosity and the right skills.

7. Disruption Patterns (from The Invincible Company)

Inspired by a “beautiful book” (with lovely big pictures but tiny text) she read ~2 years ago; she summarized its ~360 pages into nine “disruption helper cards” mapped onto the canvas structure — examples of companies that didn’t go for the obvious.

7.1 Value proposition — not always the obvious lever

• Innovating on value proposition usually means lowering prices or adding a product/feature — not a big innovation; aim for something that disrupts the market in a genuinely new way.

7.2 Channel kings

• Innovators who changed how to reach and acquire large numbers of customers.

7.3 Market explorers

• Innovate on customer segments by tapping completely new / untapped / underserved markets — e.g., Tesla.

7.4 Gravity creators

• Innovate on customer relationship by making it hard to leave/switch — e.g., Windows; her personal example, Meetup (“it’s crazy to switch, so I’m still paying for it”).

7.5 Backstage disruption — scalers

• Radically new ways to scale — e.g., IKEA turning customers into the furniture assemblers (“they created resources from us, outsourced activities to customers”).

7.6 Activity differentiators

• Change which activities to perform and how to combine them.

7.7 Resource castles

• Key resources impossible for competitors to copy — e.g., Meetup’s huge existing base of connections/members.

7.8 Cost/margin/revenue differentiators

• Cost differentiators, margin masters, revenue differentiators.

7.9 It’s easy in hindsight

• “Of course IKEA makes us assemble the furniture” — but it wasn’t obvious when they were ideating; innovation must be a repeated process, not a one-time event.

8. Case Study: Nespresso

8.1 The successful model

• A favorite disruptor, mainly a revenue differentiator: repetitive pod sales (recurring revenue), not just one-time machine sales — machine revenue mostly goes to the manufacturers.
• Also a channel innovation: machines sold in retail shops, but pods sold only in Nespresso’s own stores.

8.2 The original (wrong) model that failed

• In 1987 Nespresso launched with a very different model: sell the Nespresso system to offices via a joint venture sales force with the machine manufacturers.
• Neither manufacturers nor offices liked it — it failed, with the same technology.
• Lesson: the difference between success and failure was the business model; “innovation doesn’t mean you always need a new Nespresso — it means coming up with the right business model that creates new value in your context.”

9. Exercise 2 — Escape Thinking (10 min)

• Not the “subtraction method” from Systematic Inventive Thinking (an attendee asked) — just the escape-thinking technique, applicable to anything.
• Method: look at your current business model, list the attributes of something, remove one attribute, and imagine how it would work without it.
• Applied to the canvas: as a team, pick any one attribute to eliminate and ideate how the business could work without it — discussion is enough (post-its optional).
• Feedback it generates: new perspective, forces thinking outside the box, anticipates “what if” scenarios, opens up unique opportunities — “it opens up our thinking.”

10. Exercise 3 — Disruption Cards

• Uses the disruption cards (the nine innovator styles summarized on the canvas).
• Pick cards for which section of the canvas to innovate on, then step into that innovator’s shoes; each card has guiding questions for that section.
• Instruction: select two cards (one yourself, one someone else’s) to guide the team’s thinking about what could be done with the whole canvas.
• Example from a prior workshop: a team started on channel, moved to customer segment, and realized that to tempt more women into certain kinds of work they could redesign accordingly — that was the innovation.

11. What We Did & Takeaways

11.1 The arc of the session

• Gathered convergent info inside the box (business modeling), then stepped outside the box and crossed the borders in our minds, looking for alternative ideas, not correct answers.
• Don’t stop an idea because it seems crazy — “just go on with the discussion; it doesn’t cost anything.”

11.2 The walk-away slide

• Before you begin anything, always visualize and deeply understand the context — “don’t be blind.”
• Keep curiosity alive; stay open to new ideas; don’t stop ideating just because it seems crazy.
• Innovation is about processes and tools.
• Homework: try it out — alone, then with your team — “it doesn’t cost a thing.” She’ll share the presentation and the Miro template; a QR-code form collects one reflection: what was valuable to you.

People & References Cited

• Zsófi Herendi — speaker; product manager at Tesco Technology; visual thinker; founder of DDD Hungary meetup; co-founder of Virtual DDD community; ~15 years in fintech before Tesco (joined “last October”).
• Alexander Osterwalder — invented the Business Model Canvas (2008); “goes beyond the blah blah blah.”
• Simon Wardley — earlier Craft talk on situational awareness.
• Dan North (“Dan Norris” in transcript) — earlier talk referencing shared understanding.
• Book: The Invincible Company (Osterwalder et al.) — the ~360-page source of the nine disruption patterns, condensed into “disruption helper cards.”
• Companies as examples: Netflix (canvas walkthrough), Tesla (market explorer), Windows & Meetup (gravity creators / resource castle), IKEA (scaler), Nespresso (revenue/channel innovator; 1987 failed office model).
• Tools/frameworks: Business Model Canvas, Lean Startup Canvas, Miro, Domain-Driven Design, escape thinking, Systematic Inventive Thinking (subtraction method, mentioned/dismissed).

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPbmz30qjEc — Transcript via yt-transcript.sh; outline generated from the transcript.