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The RITE Framework — Innovation as Standard Practice
Notes from designing JCorp's RITE — Recognise, Ideate, Test, Execute — the innovation and centre-of-excellence framework that gives a 50-subsidiary group one disciplined way to ship ideas.
- leadership
- digital-transformation
- case-study
Most innovation programmes inside large groups fail in the same place. The Recognise step is loud — workshops, hackathons, town-hall slides. The Execute step is loud too, because that's where budget gets approved and reputations get made. What quietly breaks the loop is the middle: the Ideate-to-Test transition, where 80 % of ideas should die cleanly and the remaining 20 % should reach a working prototype on a known cadence.
RITE was designed around that middle. Recognise is treated as a recurring intake function — not a one-off event. Ideate runs as a structured exercise against a known set of value tests rather than as brainstorming. Test is a sprint-shaped commitment with a public end date. Execute hands off to the operating business with a defined value loop. The four letters look simple on a slide because the entire point is that they have to read simply for the framework to survive contact with fifty subsidiaries.
The honest result, after two years, is that the framework's most valuable property turns out to be the disciplined exit. Most ideas don't make it through. The org's energy stays focused on the small number of bets that survive the testing gate — and the ones that do survive arrive at the Execute step with the value loop already mapped, not pencilled in for later.