X-IDEA is an innovation process method designed to help organisations to reliably produce meaningful deliverables in innovation projects. Grounded in traditional models of creative problem solving, I developed the X-IDEA methodology and refined it over time through my work on real-life innovation projects with organisations, local, international and supranational. I structure the paper into five parts. Part 1 explains why there was a need to develop a new innovation process method. The second part reviews the literature on structured models for creative problem solving, innovation and design thinking, and identifies shortcomings of other methods. After briefly discussing the chosen research approach for this paper in part 3, I explain X-IDEA in detail in the fourth part, thereby elaborating on how its methodological design cures identified delivery gaps of other models. The final part discusses how X-IDEA may provide inspirations for practitioners and posits future research directions.