Business Thinking for Designers

The Innovation Ambition Matrix
While preparing for a negotiation is crucial, in my experience, 
many occur because stakeholders or team members are not 
aligned on how ambitious each wants to be with a project or 
plan. To best gauge this ambition, there’s a fantastic tool called 
the Innovation Ambition Matrix. 
Introduced by Bansi Nagji and Geoff Tuff at the Monitor Group, 
this tool is primarily used to unify and balance the innovation 
efforts inside an organization — but I’ve found it to be very 
helpful for products as well. It helps clarify where cross-
functional partners “think” the organization is playing and how 
everyone expects the organization will win.
The matrix itself is based on a graph with “How to Win” on 
the x-axis and “Where to Play” on the y-axis. From a product 
standpoint, “How to Win” can be any of three types of products 

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Communicate the options
in an organizational portfolio: existing, adding incremental 
features, or developing something new (radical). “Where to 
Play” points to the types of customers the product will serve: 
existing, adjacent, or a new customer market. 
With this graph set up, the primary goal of the Matrix is to 
determine how ambitious cross-functional partners want to be. 
There are three levels of ambition: