Enterprise Services · 2014–2019
Designing the System That Produces Innovation
Building coherence infrastructure for innovation at a 20,000-person enterprise
300M
Customers served
12
Teams trained
6
New products piloted
40%
Faster concept-to-test
The Challenge
Innovation at Asurion was ad-hoc. Good ideas existed but had no repeatable path from insight to prototype to validated concept. This is the inverse of Process as Shield: instead of process replacing learning, there was no process at all. Product teams operated in silos, rarely talking to customers directly, and relied heavily on competitive analysis rather than original research. Leadership wanted to 'be more innovative' but hadn't invested in the structural conditions to make that possible.
The Approach
Designed a structured innovation practice tailored to Asurion's scale, not a generic workshop format, but coherence infrastructure that could be embedded into existing team workflows. Shared frameworks, explicit decision rights for experimentation, and learning cycles baked into the process.
Trained 12 cross-functional teams through hands-on workshops focused on user empathy, collaborative ideation, and rapid testable prototyping.
Created a 'learn by doing' model: each team applied the framework to a real business problem during training, producing actionable prototypes rather than theoretical exercises.
Built internal facilitator capacity so the program could sustain itself without depending on a single design team to run every session. The goal was structural change, not a one-time event.
The Outcome
Six new product concepts made it to pilot within the first year. Time from concept to first user test dropped 40%. But the deeper win was structural: teams started talking to customers before building, and cross-functional collaboration became the norm rather than the exception. The program expanded beyond the initial pilot teams into a company-wide practice. The organization had not added innovative people. It had built the conditions for the innovative people it already had.