Course Description

According to Theodore Levitt, “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” Many think innovation happens only in isolated groups
or departments, in a flash overnight, or from a lone genius working late at night in their lab. The reality is, the seeds of innovation are planted whenever someone says to themselves, “What if …” … and it is up to leadership to nurture these ideas into improved products and services. But how do we do that?

In this course, we will examine the great innovations of the past, IDEO’s methods, and the Ten Types of Innovation to determine what innovation process could work for your organization. Prior to the course, you will take an assessment to determine the innovation strengths and opportunities your organization may have. During the course we will examine which strategies and tactics would get you closer to a systematic pipeline of service and produce improvement.

Course Outline

Lesson 1: Creating Psychological Safety and Independence

• Assessing and diagnose the level of independence within your organization
• Determine which tactics could be employed to increase autonomy, risk taking, and experimentation

Lesson 2: Using Stakeholder Insights and Perspectives

• Determine the level of customer/stakeholder focus
• Make a plan for systematically collecting and distributing customer, employee, and market feedback

Lesson 3: Exercising the Idea Generator

• Examine the history of innovation through the methods of Einstein, Edison, DaVinci and others Exercise brainstorming and collaboration methods to harvest the greatest yield of ideas

Lesson 4: Engaging Leadership

• Assess the level of leadership support of innovation and determine a strategy for engagement Develop a plan to steadily introduce tactics and processes to increase the improvement pipeline

Learner Outcomes

• Increase the level of employee independence to encourage creativity
• Adopt best practices for enhancing customer focus
• Exercise idea generation through brainstorming and collaboration
• Systematically engage leadership to support and champion improvement ideas