Frameworks for Innovation

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Innovation plays a crucial role in the ability of every business to effectively respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by both local and global economies and the environment we operate within. This training course provides the critical skills and tools for developing and sustaining innovation and creating new and improved products, services and processes.

Course objectives

This course will allow participants to:

• Solve problems and spot opportunities creatively
• Improve existing products and services
• Create new products, services and strategies
• Become an innovation leader
• Ensure that innovation activity is sustainable

Innovation

Innovators are, above all, problem solvers.  They don’t sit in front of a workbench and say ‘I wonder what will happen if I add this widget to this whatsit – Oh look a self-sealing-stembolt!’  (There are people who do that – they’re called research scientists and 99% of the time they are just proving that widget plus whatsit = deadend.  That’s a valuable part of the process of understanding our world and when it does lead to something that works it can be earth shattering but it’s a very inefficient way to innovate.)

Innovators see problems in the world around them all the time. They see the status quo as something to be challenged and improved upon rather than something to be accepted and put up with. They see a need, have an idea of how to combine matter and energy to fill that need AND they are also able to implement it.  Inventors create stuff – innovators make things change.

A great way to kick off your innovation process is to attend my one day workshop, Frameworks for Innovation.  This highly interactive and intensive course can also be tailored to suit your particular needs.

My role in the innovation process can include:

• helping you generate new ideas with the tools and methods used by world class companies;
• working with you to refine your vision into a purpose that can be shared with your customers, your stakeholders and your team;
• managing the process of developing detailed requirements and plans including functional and non-functional specifications, tender documentation, establishing milestones and decision gateways and communications planning;
• co-ordinating the timely delivery of your requirements through your team, your contractors and your suppliers;
• pro-actively managing risks and issues as they arise and ensuring that you have all the information you need to choose from alternative courses of action;
• providing quality assurance for you through testing and regular reviews;
• ensuring that your innovation is implemented when and how you want and that it delivers the expected results.

Case Study: Facilitating innovation

A product team had been challenged to come up with some truly innovative ideas for a Personal Loan product.  The Product Manager asked me to plan and facilitate an innovation day which would enable the team to think outside the box.

The first step was to ensure that the venue was ‘off-site’ in an environment that would not trigger business-as-usual thinking patterns.  I asked the team members what techniques they had used before for creative thinking and developed the whole day around methods that were new to all of them.  The final programme involved varied and occasionally shocking techniques such as Reversal, Provocation, Random Input and Concept Fans.  Between the innovation exercises I ran warm-up, team building, conflict and trust exercises to ensure the team were really Performing.

By 5pm the team was completely exhausted but very pleased with themselves.  They had come up with many flipcharts’ worth of ideas that they had never thought of before.