Burn The Playbook - B2B GTM Strategies with Marc Crosby

Innovation Playbooks: How to Build What Actually Works with Tendayi Viki

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Innovation playbooks that work. In this episode of the Burn The Playbook Podcast, Marc Crosby sits with Tendayi Viki, partner at Strategyzer and author of Pirates in the Navy, to break down how large companies build a repeatable system for real innovation instead of theater. You’ll learn how to run sprints, scorecard bets, and connect sales, R&D, and leadership so ideas turn into revenue.

What you’ll learn

  • What an effective innovation playbook looks like and why “traditional” playbooks stall
  • How to define innovation outcomes, not activities
  • A simple cadence and timeline for sprints (6–12 weeks) that actually ship learning
  • How to blend bottom-up rebels with top-down support
  • Ways to stop one-customer projects from trapping your roadmap
  • How to use AI without speeding in the wrong direction
  • The scorecard question every leader should answer tomorrow morning

Tendayi's Bio

Tendayi Viki is an author and corporate advisor specializing in securing buy-in for
innovation, transformation and breakthrough ideas. With a PhD in Psychology and
an MBA, he helps leaders and teams bridge the gap between how organizations
plan change and how people actually experience it. As a Partner at Strategyzer, he
has worked with global organizations like Symrise, Novartis, Unilever and Pearson. A Thinkers50 Innovation Award finalist, he was also named on the Thinkers50 2018
Radar List for emerging management thinkers.

Chapters
00:00 Cold open
00:31 Intro and guest setup
01:07 Tendayi calls in from Harare, Zimbabwe
01:42 Why traditional playbooks freeze innovation
04:01 What “innovation” means beyond a workshop
05:26 Timelines: day workshop vs 6–12 week sprint
06:48 Sales, customers, and avoiding innovation theater
08:12 Pirates in the Navy: rebels plus relationships
10:25 “Show me when it hits the bottom line”
13:17 Culture: bottom-up and top-down at the same time
14:53 Connect sales and R&D with a continuous loop
17:20 The single-customer trap and how to test for scale
19:19 “Moneyball” innovation: start without budget, plan funding early
21:47 AI hype vs. real transformation
24:04 Can AI accelerate in the wrong direction? Guardrails
30:23 Burn it or Build it: rapid-fire takes
40:33 One action to start tomorrow: innovation scorecard
41:40 Where to find Tendayi and Strategyzer

Who this helps

  • Manufacturing and industrial leaders with flat growth
  • Business unit heads under quarterly pressure
  • Sales and product teams tired of “throw it over the wall”
  • Corporate innovators who need executive air cover

Guest

  • Tendayi Viki, Partner at Strategyzer; author of Pirates in the Navy and The Lean Product Lifecycle
  • Website: https://tendaiviki.com

  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tendaiviki

Host


Views expressed are our own and do not represent any organizations

© 2025 Digital Rebels Consulting. All rights reserved.


Digital Rebels Consulting (00:31)
Welcome in I'm Marc Crosby. This is burn the playbook my guest today is Tendai Vicky an author and corporate advisor specialing and securing buy-in for innovation transformation and breakthrough ideas with a PhD in psychology and an MBA he helps leaders and teams bridge the gap between how organizations plan change and how people actually experience it as a partner at strategizer He has worked with global organizations like Simrise Novartis Unilever and Pearson just to name a few welcome today

Tendayi Viki (00:59)
Thank you. Thank you for having me, Mark. Really appreciate the chance to be here. Looking forward to it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:04)
Nice, where are you calling in from today?

Tendayi Viki (01:07)
So I'm based in Harare in Zimbabwe. That's where I live with my family. I I lived in London for a few years, well actually for a couple of decades. And then I moved out here during COVID and yeah, we just never went back.

Digital Rebels Consulting (01:11)
Nice.

Very cool. ⁓ So I appreciate you joining Burn the Playbook, but your strategy or your strategy for strategizer is actually developing playbooks. So what separates an effective playbook that enables innovation from one that actually stalls and we should in a sense, burn that playbook.

Tendayi Viki (01:42)
Yeah that was funny actually when you invited me on a podcast called Brendan Playbook. Meanwhile I said that we're launching Playbooks as our strategy going forward for least the next three to five years. But what we've realized is that actually

I think you're right having to say burn the playbook, especially if you want to qualify and say burn the traditional playbook. Because when we're working with organizations, right, one of the challenges we have is that the playbooks that they use to drive innovation are playbooks for running the existing business. So it's the playbook for finance, it's the playbook for hiring, it's the playbook for execution. And when you have a new idea, they don't have any other playbooks in their...

They don't have any other plays in their playbook, guess, you want to say that. They don't have any other playbooks on their shelves that they can apply to innovation. And so it's a real struggle inside large organizations. I often do this sketch where I'm like, here you explore new opportunities, here you exploit your current success. And the problem is when you take...

all the things that you're doing to run your core business and apply them to, you know, exploring new opportunities. And I think that's the big, big challenge. So that's what frees innovation, you know.

Digital Rebels Consulting (02:53)
Exactly. Yeah. And I think he kind of nailed it as far as, ⁓ burn the playbook and kind of the, premise of the title of this podcast is because what I found just over the years is that they continue. They, as far as just companies, ⁓ and legacy businesses, they just keep, ⁓ rerunning the same script over and over again. And, know, kind of what got you here today, won't accelerate growth and definitely won't lead to success for the next three to five and 10 years. And a lot of businesses.

⁓ globally, especially here in the North America, far as manufacturing, those legacy businesses, are struggling a little bit. mean, sales are a little bit flat PMI installed. ⁓ so if you want to grow in 2026, you need to, in a sense, kind of use what you talk about with large companies and write a new playbook innovate. And I guess define what innovation actually means. So in my experience, you know, large companies that you've worked with, like, you know, lever Novartis, ⁓ and a lot of.

Tendayi Viki (03:23)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (03:47)
just companies in general, everyone says that they're all innovative and we all have innovation teams. But what does that mean as far as running a two day workshop that's innovative and actually, you know, deploying innovation within a large organization?

Tendayi Viki (04:01)
Yeah, it's interesting. guess, you know, we often say we want to meet organizations where they are. So I guess it's another cool thing, right, in terms of burning the playbook. Like we don't really have like a definitive structure of how it goes. It's mostly about meeting them where they are. some...

Some companies are struggling with, for example, they've tried to do innovation, they three or four projects that are stalled and they're not hitting their goals. And then they bring us in to help them figure out exactly where they are on the journey and what they need to do next. And then we start using a difference that we're like, well, the way you'd be managing this is actually wrong. We need you to use this playbook. And in this playbook, we map the business model using the business model canvas. In this playbook, we make explicit all the things that have to be true for the idea to work.

And in this playbook, we prioritize those hypotheses and choose the ones that are important for success. And then we start testing those hypotheses and using the learnings to iterate on the business model. So we're running a different playbook now, right? And you can say the same thing about a new idea. Imagine what it would look like if it was good. Okay, let's map that. Okay, great. I would have to be true for that to work.

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:09)
Hmm?

Tendayi Viki (05:11)
We map those hypotheses again. And then again, we run testing and iterating based on learning. So you can see that the principles are kind of the same, but the way you enter the conversation just depends on where organizations are.

Digital Rebels Consulting (05:26)
And what you're describing, how long should that innovation process take? Is it a one day workshop? Is it a six week quarterly process? What do you typically see as being the most effective as far as a timeframe to create this innovation?

Tendayi Viki (05:42)
So that's interesting right because it all depends on what your goals are. So if your goal is to find out where you are

and that's work that we've been, leaders have got, like we've got a portfolio of 10 innovations, we don't know which ones are worth investing in or carrying on investing in, and then we're like, ⁓ okay, let's do the workshop, and then they make the decision of what they want to carry on investing in, that's a day. But if you're gonna actually go through the whole journey of going from idea to validated business model, then that can take anything from six weeks to 12 weeks to six months, depending on a whole bunch of variables.

Are the teams working on the idea full time? Do they have access to customers to test their ideas with or is sales blocking them from customers? Do they have resources? Can they build prototypes? Can they launch landing pages, et cetera, et So all of those other sort of governance.

organization of blockers then determine the length of time it takes. And what we find is, especially for the first run of an innovation sprint, you are actually like doing the innovation while at the same time cutting down all the weeds that are on the road and building this pathway for other innovators that are following behind to then follow.

Digital Rebels Consulting (06:48)
Mm-hmm.

Gotcha. You had mentioned ⁓ sales blocking innovation or maybe sales talking to customers. ⁓ In my history of being in corporate and being in sales and leading sales teams, I've always been the one who would raise my hand and saying, please, let's try that with our customers because in our commodity markets, typically in the manufacturing industrial spaces, there's just a lack of innovation, at least, know, true, true innovation that creates value and something that differentiates you from your.

competitors. And so I've always felt that I resonated with your book called Pirates in the Navy, just because I felt like that pirate. was willing to challenge the status quo. had that intrapreneurial ⁓ mindset. so I guess, ⁓ what do you see as far as, ⁓ helping, I guess, develop that culture of being a pirate in the Navy? And I guess for listeners who are not familiar with that concept, ⁓ tell them what that means as far as the, you got that name Pirates in the Navy for your book.

Tendayi Viki (07:48)
Yeah, yeah, fascinating, right? Because was Steve Jobs, he's the one that said it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. And he was talking about how startups just work faster than large companies, right? They just do more and they make faster decisions. It's a whole speedboat comparison. But actually, if you're going to...

Digital Rebels Consulting (07:54)
Mm. Mm.

Tendayi Viki (08:12)
innovate inside large organization, you have to figure out a way to somehow bring that entrepreneurial culture into this kind of large ship, right? And so I wrote the book Pirates in the Navy, but actually for me when I wrote the book Pirates in the Navy, what I was really focused on was actually helping innovators.

because what I was seeing was innovators were like burning out, shooting themselves in the foot. And I needed innovators to understand that to be a successful innovator inside large organizations, you have to be good at two things at the same time. The first one is you have to have the skill of entrepreneurial. You have to be able to generate ideas, test ideas, test business models, and do that in an authentic way and not engage in innovation theater. But again, to succeed inside a large organization, you also need to be able to build relationships.

because ⁓ Joe Gertner who wrote the book on AT &T, I think it's called the idea factory, says that like there's not a person or single individual that could ever innovate inside the large organization. Because if we say that a successful innovation is going from idea to business in the market.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:08)
Mm-hmm.

Tendayi Viki (09:21)
that automatically means the answer to the question is marketing is going to have to get involved, sales is going to have to get involved, at some point you go in compliance are going to have to get involved. So all of these people are going to have to somehow make a contribution on that journey and the question is do they make a positive or a negative contribution and sometimes

they make a negative contribution simply because the innovator themselves have been burning bridges while they've been working on the innovation. So that's why I wrote the book first, it was like you need to build relationships. You need to be this contradiction of entrepreneurial maverick and political diplomats all in the same person in order to succeed inside corporate environments.

Digital Rebels Consulting (09:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I've always said it. need to sell just as much internally as you do externally on the commercial front, just because you have to have people buy into your ideas, buy into the vision and buy into what that means for developing something new for your customers. ⁓ especially as I mentioned before, as far as commodity markets, ⁓ you have to pull that through as far as what does it mean for the business? What does that mean for your customers? But I think some of

Tendayi Viki (10:16)
Exactly.

Digital Rebels Consulting (10:25)
The problems with that is, is, you get the executive leaders on their opinion. say, well, how does this translate to the bottom line? So do you get that pushback as far as when you are doing a workshop or you're trying to promote innovation or trying to promote a pirates in the Navy sort of culture, as far as not everything's going to translate to the bottom line, but it might relate to a sale because you're doing something different and you are adding value for a customer. What do you think about that?

Tendayi Viki (10:52)
Yes, yeah, I don't know exactly how to tackle your question because I always argue with innovators about this more than I argue with leaders because the goal of innovation is to create value. We're not hanging out. Now, the way we know how to create value when you're working on ideas, new ideas, transformative ideas, is to understand that you're not going to find the thing that works every time.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:03)
Okay.

Tendayi Viki (11:17)
on the journey to finding the things that work, you're going to do a lot of things that are not going to work. But ultimately, the goal of finding things that are not going to work is to eventually find things that work. Because if all we do with innovation is find things that don't work, then we might as well not do anything. That's really, important.

So what innovators try and do is to try and say, no, no, no, it may not hit the bottom line, but it's creating value somewhere. It's like, okay, well show me the value. If the value is this sales process was taking three weeks and now it takes two weeks. That's value created. This thing was taking two months and now we close those deals in two weeks, which means that if we spin this thing now, we can grow revenue this way. Right. So that's a really fundamental question that has to be addressed from the innovator side.

Digital Rebels Consulting (11:43)
Mm-hmm.

Tendayi Viki (12:04)
From the leader's side, the question is not, me where this hits the bottom line. The real question is show me when this hits the bottom line. And as, like we need to kind of coach leaders to shift that question. If the expectation is that with innovation, it's gonna hit the bottom line this quarter, that's not gonna happen, right?

So we have to shift expectations there. And that's really the conversation that we try to manage. What horizons are we working towards? And then what are the milestones that show us that we're on track on that journey? It's not just a black box. Oh, we'll show you revenue near five. Now leave us alone. We also don't want innovators to be saying stuff like that. So that's all like really critical things. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (12:47)
Mm-hmm.

Gotcha. And as far as innovation, I I'll keep coming back at least to commodity markets and, you know, manufacturing and these sorts of legacy businesses. ⁓ What are some, I guess, effective ways to develop a culture of innovation? Does it start at the top? ⁓ Do you have to create a special innovation team or what do you see as the most effective ways in order to develop a culture of innovators and pirates in the Navy?

Tendayi Viki (13:17)
Yeah, so I used to, when I first started my career, I was a real believer in the bottom-up approach. I was like, get a group of early adopters and you work on innovation and then eventually you change the culture. And I actually suddenly realized that you have to do both. You have to go bottom-up and top-down. And because Clayton Christensen is the one who said like,

a horrible organizational process will defeat a good human being every time. Like no matter how good your intentions, once you're in the machine, it's really hard to kind of shift your behavior if the machine's pushing you in a certain direction. And so we have to do this dance of like illustrating the value that innovation creates. And for that, you need rebels, you need pirates, you need these people that are willing to take risks with you. You need a lot of marks to get to work at the beginning. But while you're doing that, you have to be

Digital Rebels Consulting (13:43)
Mm-hmm.

Tendayi Viki (14:07)
collaborating with at least a few leaders to start institutionalizing and formalizing some of these methodologies. And so how you do that depends on the leaders, depends on context, but I think it really matters to do both bottom up and also top down.

Digital Rebels Consulting (14:24)
Gotcha. ⁓ on the commercial front, typically customers or the salespeople are working with customers and they're hearing a lot of the pain points and some of the things that why don't you offer this or could you do this? but it seems innovation kind of lives, I guess in the back room, so to speak with R and D and product and the corporate buildings. And then it kind of gets delivered from there. So, ⁓ how do you connect the two effectively on a repeatable basis? ⁓ what do you see that works?

Tendayi Viki (14:53)
Yeah, I think it's a real mistake for people that are talking to customers every day to not be informing what the innovators are doing. I remember I used to write for Forbes. I don't anymore, but I used to write for Forbes. And one of the articles I wrote was I interviewed the CTO of Colgate. And she actually told me that the people who do the market research are the R &D scientists.

Like she, she was like, we don't just like let them sit in the lab. Like they have to go out and have conversations with customers and go out there with sales teams and try and sell. And then we use that to kind of have this like customer driven R and D process where we're taking, you know, input and feedback from customers. So I really think it's a mistake. think building cross-functional teams. And if you can't build cross-functional teams, institutionalizing iterative conversations that happen all the time. Because if you're working in a German middle-aged company, which is what I've done sometimes.

There's like a civil war going on between sales and R &D and so the sales guys are like these R &D people never make anything customers want and the R &D people are saying these sales guys don't know how to sell anything we make. It's like it's like you know it's chucking things over the wall and so you gotta kind of build this almost like this loop of continuous conversations you know between the two groups yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (15:45)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, I'm chuckling on the inside just because I've been there and enough for most of my life as far as just ⁓ product and R &D kind of throwing stuff over the fence as you were saying and and then you have to figure out okay Where does this fit and then you have to figure out you know? have this product that's supposed to be innovative and it's new and it does all these great things Now I have to go hunt and figure out where this fits in the marketplace

And that's not an effective strategy as far as winning business because you're just trying to find a round peg round hole. And, ⁓ that takes time. And from my perspective, it's, it's, not effective. And like you said, it has to be a continuous loop. And as far as what's working and what's not working, and I guess in the sense of throwing things over the fence, what are your thoughts on, you know, an innovative product that was made for, for one customer and why that shouldn't work for any other customer, other than the customer that asked for it they developed it and we're promoting it because we put all the

And now we just have to scale it just because, do you see that quite frequently?

Tendayi Viki (17:14)
Man like you would not believe our

R &D led companies suffer from this a lot and the reason stuff is a lot is most of them are making like either specific packaging for like Amazon like it's a big customer right or like a specific ingredient for Pepsi Like a little thing that goes in Pepsi max or something. So when those windows Customers turn around and go could you just do this little thing?

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:20)
Mm-hmm.

Tendayi Viki (17:43)
We know that if we do that fix, it's $5 million, $10 million to the bottom line this quarter. So what you end up with is just like a stack of single customer versions of all these offers that haven't had a chance to be tested in the market to see if they resonate with any of your other customers. And so there is no guarantee. If you're going to do that, just know that you're doing that.

Digital Rebels Consulting (17:58)
Mm-hmm.

Tendayi Viki (18:08)
you're going to get an immediate return. But if you want to then scale this, you're starting from zero with the other customers, you got to have conversations, you got to test it, you got to, then you got to be a company that does this delivery for the existing customer and then deliberately runs an innovation sprint to take this existing tech and see if anybody else wants it. And the chances are some will want it and some won't. And sometimes it's just for the customer, you know? So it's just something we to deal with. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (18:34)
Yeah.

In lot those cases, you pumped a lot of money, I guess, into a development project. And it is what it is. And I understand it, but there's just better ways to, guess, maybe prevent that from happening. ⁓ And I guess for companies that don't have, I guess, a budget allocated to innovation, so to speak, ⁓ what would be kind of like a moneyball approach to kind of do it without a budget? Because I think you can create. ⁓

new things without necessarily having like a huge budget. Sometimes it's just iterating what you have or maybe just getting the right people involved maybe to make a couple of adjustments to an offering so to speak that's a bolt on to your service. But I guess the question is I guess how do you innovate without any money?

Tendayi Viki (19:19)
Okay, so. How

do you innovate without any money? All right, so I think you can get started. Yeah, I have, for sure. I think you can get started without any money. I think that the first phase of innovation where you're talking to customers, figuring out needs, evolving the idea, I think that can happen pretty quickly.

Digital Rebels Consulting (19:27)
Ever got that question before?

Tendayi Viki (19:43)
I think that one of the, and I remember being in a couple of conversations with leaders about this, think one of the bigger challenges is all that energy, all that momentum that's built up in those early stages.

if it hits this wall where people then go, ⁓ it wasn't in the budget for this year, you're going to have to wait another four months. Well, we decide whether you can continue because like in that way, you to kill the momentum that you're creating. So what I would say to you is you can't innovate without any money. You can get started without money. But somehow in the process of letting people start, somewhere in the background, someone has to be saying if any of these things hit,

Digital Rebels Consulting (20:22)
Mm-hmm.

Tendayi Viki (20:23)
how are going to fund it? Like that question has to be getting answered by someone. So sometimes I often say actually the head of innovation, the person who's like leading the innovation teams, they're more the politicians. So the innovation teams can be doing the testing and iterating, but them...

if the head of innovation or the chief innovation officer are having forward-looking conversations, they listen, we have these things coming down the pipeline. And we think actually two or three of these are already starting to show signs of value for customers, something we might want to make. Which business wants to support this? Can I get budgets to build prototypes? Can you unlock a custom relationship so we can do a pilot? Can you, can you, can you? Because what tends to happen is when you're innovating without any money.

you get to the moment where you get ready to do the next stage and that's when you start asking for money. And that's a huge, huge mistake I think that innovators make.

Digital Rebels Consulting (21:14)
Speaking of mistakes, since everything these days is AI powered and AI enabled and ⁓ companies are kind of wrestling with the challenges of what the heck to do with it, whether it's an R and D or making products or sales marketing. ⁓ How is AI impacting your business conversations that you're having with large organizations as far as how that directly impacts innovation? Are we just, I don't know. ⁓

applying, I guess, new concepts to existing foundations that are already broken.

Tendayi Viki (21:47)
Yeah, yeah, that is,

there is something to that. You're absolutely right about that. So it's funny. Yesterday and today I was working on proposals with two clients.

And one insisted that I have to frame it, frame all the work around AI. She said, like, if you don't frame it around AI, your proposal is not going to get accepted. We're all, all we're focused on in this company is AI. So I had to go and reframe that, right. And then the other one, because I was like, no, no, no, take out all the AI stuff. Like transformation is transformation. We want to be able to do more than just AI. And so you're seeing like, you know, we're like in this kind of early wild, wild west type.

days where some people are like all in, some people are like half in, and some people are like waiting to see, right? And so it's fascinating because in one sense, AI does change everything, from a, just from a technology standpoint and the capabilities that it brings to organizations and what you can do with it from value proposition creation to, to like the, the, knowledge work jobs that are getting disrupted. Like it's, it's a massive moment and that's

It's just what it is, like the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution. It's a massive moment. You have to get on. But in another sense, AI changes nothing, right? Because you can optimize a broken business model. It's not going to make it better. So the whole idea of you need a cool technology to create value propositions.

then you need to deliver those value propositions to customers, then customers have to be willing to pay for that value in a way that makes the business models profitable and scalable. That's still true. Great. It's just that now that, you know, the, the accelerant around that change is more powerful and has more exponential effects on, on, on how you find and create that value.

Digital Rebels Consulting (23:46)
Can Excel can AI accelerate innovation in the wrong direction? I mean, because I would think that if AI was always see it all the time, as far as every we're doing everything faster, but is it can it take you faster in the wrong direction to where it takes you even longer to kind of reset and realize you made some mistakes? How do you feel about that?

Tendayi Viki (24:04)
Yeah,

fascinating. We, um, was having a conversation again. So we were in Zurich running the strategy at the bootcamp. And on the way back, sat in the train with one of our developers who's working on our platform. And they were telling me a conversation they just had with a new developer we just hired was talking about how AI accelerates code, right? Like code writing. But if you're even like 1 % off and you don't pick it up.

it accelerates like the the multiplying effects of being off but you end up like 90 % off right because you want that off today but in two weeks you're like way way off because of the speed that actually goes so i don't know whether it's always going to be the case that there is a human intervention that also checks whether we're directionally correct i don't know that's always going to be the case but it is definitely currently the case

And so if you're working on innovation and you have AI do market research for you using whatever is available out there, sure, you can build a customer profile. But if you then don't take it and talk to at least five customers yourself, just make sure that like all the things are like exactly. And then you can actually come back to AI and go, you know what, you told me these things when I spoke to customers and they say these things. And then it can integrate that for you and build you a better, you know.

composite profile but just relying on A &P right now I don't know in the future perhaps people might call me a laggard

Digital Rebels Consulting (25:41)
I don't think so. mean, you have to have a balance just like anything else. like you were saying, at least with some of their customers, ⁓ know, it's all or nothing. And I think that's just where people make the mistakes is like, we don't want any AI, we want all the AI. But let's just find some middle ground to just understand what the capabilities are, understand what the pitfalls are, and still have and still also work on the foundations of our business. So we can grow both together at the same time. I think for me, I think that's a winning strategy. But

Tendayi Viki (25:57)
Mm-hmm.

Digital Rebels Consulting (26:09)
Research shows that 90 % of AI initiatives fail and I'm just curious like this. Why do you think that is?

Tendayi Viki (26:17)
Yeah, mean from the couple of people I've been talking to and for some of the research that's been out there, I really think like technology adoption and adoption of innovation and adoption of any of these things is fast when the areas in which it's being applied are easy.

or culturally simple things to do. Like I remember in one organization, they set up an AI chat bot and they were just requiring their folks to have a conversation with it three times a day or whatever, right? That's an easy one. The harder transformations are when something around the organizational infrastructure has to change.

Either you have to change the org chart or have to yank out big chunks of technology and introduce new ones. Like when that happens, there's a lot of inertia that then causes these things to actually stall. so, AI implementations inside large organizations are still transformation.

You have to do the whole transformation process to make sure that you're building momentum and these things are really sticking and being adopted by your people.

Digital Rebels Consulting (27:23)
Gotcha. And generally, what is a strategizer approach to bringing in AI for workshops or the canvas business models, all the things, all those books that you have on the back there, how are you, I guess, marrying those two up for success for 2026 and beyond?

Tendayi Viki (27:40)
Yeah, have a whole bunch of AI implementations that we're putting on our platform.

One is like, for example, generating customer value or there's another colleague of mine, Paris Thomas, really awesome guy. He's created a tool called Rapid Visual. I think they've changed the name now to Strapivo. And that one, ⁓ you can just describe what you want to do. And then it can give you a first version of a business model, kind of like already mapped ⁓ using information out there about those kinds of companies. so, yeah, so those are some of the things we're doing. mean, Alex and I also do a lot of writing.

So we're definitely using AI for content. This one was hard, right? Because I delivered a session and then we were collecting inputs from the participants. And then one of the guys was helping me put that through AI and AI summarized it.

And then we put it up on the thing and then I had to like on the spot go, this is what the AI is saying you want. And then I'd like talk through it live. But, but again, if I'd been a better prepared, if we would say take a coffee break and I didn't just read it first, you know, it would have been better for facilitation. So those are some of the things that we're trying and testing. And eventually I think we'll figure out a way to at least make some of these things that used to take forever go faster. Like for example, we used to make people like fill in every sticky note themselves, type in everything themselves. So all of that kind of stuff, I think we can make that.

go faster and we will make that go faster so we can get down to the real conversation which is you know how do we bring this business model to life.

Digital Rebels Consulting (29:13)
Yeah, I think the kind of what you're describing there is also ways that I've used AI back at corporate, as far as just those, those post-it workshops, if you will, it's just better, I think, to do it electronically, like on a Miro board or something like that, or a Figma. And then you just, you know, take all that information, dump it into AI and it gives you good results. But what would take, I don't know, hours or just an overnight, as far as just downloading all that information or pulling all the sticky notes and trying to write it down manually.

Tendayi Viki (29:26)
Yes.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (29:39)
It's just so much faster just to do it electronically. At least that's how I used it in the past for success. I don't know. Postage. I don't know. That's a whole nother, I guess, discussion as far as whether those posts.

Tendayi Viki (29:48)
Yeah,

one other thing that we're learning by the way before we move on in, you can also teach the AI to be Alex Osterwalder.

This is all the principles that Alex uses to evaluate business models in his books, et cetera. So he learns that. And then you load up the business model and you say, me this feedback, like Alex also will. And then it just runs through the questions and reviews and gives you a set of feedbacks. Not always 100 % accurate, whatever, but it's a starting point. And usually that's what you need for innovation is the seed that triggers this chain of thinking and action in teams.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:23)
Agreed. ⁓ Let's pivot over to our burn it or build it segment. These are rapid fire

have 10 questions or 10 topics. If you will, I'll ask you one topic and you tell me burn it or build it. Maybe a brief reason why I put some meaty ones up here. So this might take a little bit more than the usual. So we'll go with, I guess the first question is, are you ready? Are you ready? ⁓

Tendayi Viki (30:46)
I'm ready.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:48)
Let's do it. Number one, stage gate innovation process.

Tendayi Viki (30:52)
I would say rebuild it. Is it allowed? Okay.

Digital Rebels Consulting (30:55)
Rebuild Yes, you can rebuild. Yes, there there

is a middle ground as far as you know Don't burn it completely to the ground and maybe not build it. But ⁓ yeah rebuild I think Brent Adamson brought that on to the show ⁓ Rebuild a few episodes ago, but ⁓ your thoughts on stage gate

Tendayi Viki (31:08)
All right.

Yeah, so rebuild it because some of the stage gates are just linear when innovation is nonlinear. So you could build nonlinearity in your stage gates allowing iterative loops. So that's one way to rebuild. Another way to rebuild is to have stages that are focused on outcomes, not actions.

particularly for innovation. So we don't want stages that go talk to customers, build an MVP. We want stages that go understand customer needs, learn whether the value proposition resonates, etc. So those are ways that we've tried to help a company rebuild their stage gate processes.

Digital Rebels Consulting (31:45)
Rebuild it. It's new category. I to change this whole segment up. Burn it, build it, or rebuild it. Number two, ⁓ innovation labs separate from the core business. We talked a little bit about this. Innovation seems to happen in silos, but what are your thoughts on innovation separate from the core business?

Tendayi Viki (31:48)
Cut.

⁓ burn it that it has never been shown to work. ⁓ Eventually you need some sort of to the core because you can't really scale unless you've got extensive resources to take ideas to scale.

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:15)
Gotcha, makes sense, build a bridge. Number three, MVP, minimum viable product as a prototype.

Tendayi Viki (32:22)
I think build it. You need some kind of prototype to start testing ideas. As long as you don't polish it, right? And then it's like a minimum viable actual product.

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:28)
Gotcha.

Yeah, and I think that's probably the question right there as far as do you polish it until it's perfect or what is, I guess, an acceptable MVP as far as the 50%, 70 % there and then you start talking to customers and seeing do you have something that's actually going to scale.

Tendayi Viki (32:47)
Yeah, and there's always a judgment call, but you've got to go out there and take a few risks,

Digital Rebels Consulting (32:54)
Gotcha. Number four, annual strategic planning cycles. So basically one and done strategy session for your business.

Tendayi Viki (33:01)
Let it burn. Burn it. I mean, I just had a workshop canceled because of something that happened that's like got nothing to do. it's you can't annual. No, burn it.

Digital Rebels Consulting (33:03)
Hahaha

No,

I guess the better question is how often.

Tendayi Viki (33:18)
Yes, exactly.

Annual is not good enough. I think quarterly is good. I do think maybe monthly check-ins is also okay. yeah, I mean, there's even, I don't know if you know this organization called Beyond Budgeting. That's like, yeah, they built a whole practice that completely gets rid of the annual budgeting cycle. And does like this sort of, know, iterative sort of ongoing budgeting process. Yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (33:27)
Mm-hmm.

I'll check it out. ⁓ But I guess the takeaway is more than once a year. ⁓ Number five, crowdsourcing ideas from all employees.

Tendayi Viki (33:55)
this one I struggle with. Because the question is what happens after? So I'm not anti-crowdsourcing, but if that's like all you do and then you don't do anything with it afterwards, yeah, there's no point, you know? And also crowd-sourcing ideas that are not strategically kind of, if you don't put like these guardrails in terms of like how you want those ideas, what kinds of ideas you're looking for, like that can turn into a proper mess and then you don't know.

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:16)
guard rails. Yeah.

Tendayi Viki (34:23)
what's valuable.

Digital Rebels Consulting (34:24)
I can. And I

think from an employee engagement standpoint, if you're submitting ideas and you don't get a response or you know, whenever it kind of is deflating a little bit, if I'm putting ideas in the suggestion box and I have all these great ideas and they don't get implemented, then I feel like the company they're not listening to me and I'm wasting my time. I'm not heard. I don't know. There's a lot of, give me this, give me the story. have plenty of time.

Tendayi Viki (34:31)
Right.

I have a really good story on that by the way. Can I, can I, can can I tell you my story? Okay. So I got on

a call with a formal customer. like, tonight I really need your help. I was like, what's happening?

And they're like, we've been running these idea competitions for the last three years. And every year, the number of ideas we get submitted drops in half. So first year we had like 500. Last year we had 250. Now we've only got 50. Like, I don't know what to do. You need to help me get people re-engaged. And so I was like, okay, very interesting. But before I help you get people re-engaged, why do you need more ideas? Like you've got 500 plus 250 plus 50.

That's a lot of ideas. Why do you need more ideas? The real question is what are you doing with any of those ideas that you're getting? And then he was like, no, we don't do anything with them. We just like announce a winner. It's like a cultural vibe thing. And I was like, well, that's why people know that it's a waste of time. And so that's why you need to kind of change some of these.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:21)
Mm-hmm.

good real-world lesson there. ⁓ Yeah. Number six. ⁓ Pilot projects before scale.

Tendayi Viki (35:49)
Yeah, build. I think you do have to test before you scale.

Digital Rebels Consulting (35:53)
Yeah, I guess it's kind of in line with the MVP. Just how perfect does it need to be? And also, are you doing pilot projects on behalf of your customer or are you doing it for the wrong reasons? ⁓ Number seven, innovation teams reporting to R &D.

Tendayi Viki (36:08)
Hmm

Yeah, because I've worked with some really cool R &D people that really care about having their ideas go to market. But I've worked with some really uncool R &D people who only care about the science and they don't think it's their problem, the commercialization question. And so I guess it all depends on the relationship between

between those two and what type of R &D leader you have. But if I had to make a choice, an either or choice right now in the moment, I would not have innovation reporting to R &D. I would burn that, yeah.

Digital Rebels Consulting (36:45)
Gotcha. Burn it. Number eight, customer advisory boards for innovation input.

Tendayi Viki (36:52)
Yeah, I think those are great, it's also, it depends on what you're asking customers. Like if you're asking customers what to make, then that becomes a problem, right? Because they're constrained by.

their lack of knowledge and their own experience and what they see you've already made. But if you're doing a deep empathy thing where you're trying to understand their needs and the challenges they're facing, then I think that's actually really cool. Or if you're trying to get feedback on something that you've created to try and see if it's actually delivering value, then I also think that's cool.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:20)
Yeah. I think there could be some pitfalls there because I think like whether it's B2B or it's B2C, sometimes you're developing something that the customer asks for, but maybe the customer is wrong and maybe you need to develop something as far as from your perspective, what a solution that helps that solves a problem that then aren't having aware of.

Tendayi Viki (37:34)
Right.

Yeah, 100%.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:43)
So, and it also

depends, I think, on what customers are on that advisory board. Are they your best customers? And what does the best look like? Just because they spent the most money?

Tendayi Viki (37:49)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

Digital Rebels Consulting (37:55)
Yeah, maybe not

the main source of your innovation input, think, for that one. So maybe that's a rebuild. Number nine, an innovation fail fast mentality.

Tendayi Viki (38:05)
Inside large organizations, maybe burn.

If it means this fail fast is disruptive and it makes people anxious and legal and compliance are worried that they're going to get sued. was once a kid who put up a landing page launching a product to test whether people would sign up and they put their email for people to email them. But when the customer saw this landing page, they didn't email this kid. They called their salesperson who they'd been dealing with this whole time.

And this salesperson didn't know anything about this landing page. And so it went all the way to the CEO and this poor kid, he was new. We just trained him. He didn't get fired, but it was a problem for a couple of days. Right. And so you do need to fail fast while bringing people along. guess that would be the way I would rephrase that mantra.

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:04)
Gotcha. Yeah. Like a lot of things as far as just innovation strategy fail fast. They're like nice buzzwords, but how do you actually implement it and sustain it and then really encourage people to fail? ⁓ that's kind of a potential slippery slope. Number 10 innovation roadmaps with a three to five year timeline. burn that up.

Tendayi Viki (39:23)
Is this a strategic roadmap of where we think the world is going? Or is this a roadmap of product we want to build?

Digital Rebels Consulting (39:31)
Just a mapping this way out in the distance, very long-term planning, as far as maybe just that fail fast mentality. So I think that there's, I don't know that odds there as far as failing fast and having like a really long timeline, especially for companies that are quarterly constrained because they're just trying to hit their profit quarter after quarter. So does a three to five roadmap maybe make sense?

Tendayi Viki (39:41)
Right.

Hmm

Exactly.

I mean, unless you're building nuclear power reactors that take that long, it doesn't make any sense. And the world is changing fast.

Digital Rebels Consulting (40:00)
Yeah.

It is, it depends. Maybe AI can help solve those problems. ⁓ You get the final word. The final chapter in your book, Lain Product Lifecycle is about starting tomorrow. And that's kind of what I like to leave everybody with, with something today. So if you're running a team for a company, what's one concrete action that they should take tomorrow that moves them from innovation theater to a repeatable innovation process?

Tendayi Viki (40:33)
Yeah, I have a question that I love to ask leaders who drive innovation in their company, which is if I woke you up from your slumber, would you be able to tell me which one of your innovation projects is close to finding a business model that works?

Like, are you like aware, are you conscious of that? Right? Because that's what innovation leadership is. Innovation leadership is guiding, going from idea to business. So question is along that journey, where are you? We understand customer needs, we understand the value proposition, we're still trying to figure out pricing. So that we know what that is. For this one, we understand this, we understand that, we're still trying to figure out this. For this other one, we figured out everything. The only thing we're trying to unlock now is how do we scale this flywheel that we've just unlocked.

And so if I woke you up from your slumber, would you be able to do that? If you can't, the first thing you should do tomorrow morning is put all the projects on the list and scorecard them on their innovation journey so that you have a real understanding of what your portfolio is.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:30)
Nice score card. I like that. It's a good tip and somebody can actually do tomorrow. And where can listeners find out more about Tendai and strategizer and the 2026 playbooks.

Tendayi Viki (41:40)
Yes, so strategizer.com, ⁓ G-Y-Z-E-R, like a rap group, strategizer. And then Tadiviki.com. That's where you can also find out some of my writing.

Digital Rebels Consulting (41:55)
Very nice. this conversation. Appreciate you coming on the Burn the Playbook podcast.

Tendayi Viki (41:59)
Cool, thank you Mark.

Digital Rebels Consulting (42:01)
All right, cheers.

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