Purpose

The Project Charter is a document (either as Word or Powerpoint file or in our Project Workspace) that describes the entrepreneurial challenge of the project's sponsor and the basic setup of the project execution. A Project Charter is always the starting point of a Business Design project, usually signed by the sponsor and the innovation manager who will be in charge of leading the project team. Typically, a Project Charter gives answers to the following questions:

• Motivation: What is your motivation to start this project? (e.g. market pressure, trends, business challenge, new technological capabilities)
• Objectives: What (entrepreneurial) objectives do you want to achieve and how can we measure them? (e.g. new revenue of X, Y new customers in segment Z, cost savings of X)
• Problem statement: What internal / customers' problem(s) do you aim to address?
• Draft solution (optional): What potential solution do you have in mind to mitigate the problem(s)? 
• Assumptions (optional): What assumptions may impede the success of the solutions?
• Schedule: When does the project start and what are important milestones (= workshops)?
• Required resources: What else do we need to become a high-performance team and achieve the objectives?
• Stakeholders: Who would be involved in the first / next iteration of the project and how much time budget do we get over the next 10 weeks?
• Signature of sponsor and innovation manager

The Project Charter usually goes through a couple of iterations to get it concrete and focused enough so that the scope of the project can be handled in 10-weeks cycles. The coach is usually involved in these loops.