A bootstrapping tactic for innovation teams that don't yet have formal leadership buy-in or budget: run 5–10 small projects through the innovation funnel over roughly three months, without waiting for a mandate.
The point isn't the ideas themselves — it's that running the sprints surfaces the organizational blockers (missing evidence categories, no one empowered to unblock, no landing pad for a winner) as concrete, specific evidence. That evidence becomes the pitch to leadership for building a larger, formal system, replacing an abstract ask ("we need an innovation program") with a demonstrated, specific one ("here's exactly what stopped us three times").
Complements the three-factor capability diagnostic: where the diagnostic tells you that leadership attention/power is missing, the discovery sprint is how you generate the proof to go get it.