Developing a Culture for Innovation
If you’re frustrated with stuck-in-a-rut thinking and stop-gap solutions that create more problems than they solve, then it’s time to discover how Gateways for Innovation can make your organization a leader in innovation. Leave the stale thinking to your competitors. This Learning Lab will help your organization:
- Establish a clear organization mission and commitment for innovation
- Develop a work culture that produces a flow of fresh ideas and a process to keep them alive
- Create measures to assess how innovative your organization is
- Design systems and processes that stay flexible and productive as the needs of your organization change
- Increase your employees’ competence in creative thinking and problem solving
Innovation: An American heritage
- Innovation: combining a new way of thinking with a new way of doing
- The need for innovation and adaptability in dynamic markets and work environments
- Innovation as a process of disruption and creative destruction
- Disengaging from the past, transitioning from the status quo
- You don’t have to be a hi-tech firm to be innovative
- Best practices: characteristics of today’s truly innovative firms
Creating an organizational culture to support innovation
- Assessing your current level of innovation
- Creating an innovation profile of your organization’s current system
- Diagnosing your organization’s capacity for innovation
- Key factors in establishing innovation as the organizational norm and way of life
- Getting people to value high-performance and innovation
- Problem areas: Where innovation programs are most likely to fail
- Overcoming the “not invented here” syndrome
Aligning innovation with organizational strategy
- Knowing where your organization is and where it ought to be headed
- External factors that influence your capacity to innovate
- Making innovation a core competence of your organization
- Setting goals for innovation and productivity ideas
Designing an architecture to support innovation
- Developing systems, practices, policies, and processes that support innovation
- Examples of adaptive organizational structures
- There’s a world of difference between a skunk works and a cesspool
- Empowering employees to act upon and own ideas
- Managing the consequences of risk aversion and failure
- Executive support and commitment to change
Recognizing opportunities for innovation
- Seizing the window of opportunity when it’s presented
- Identifying the best work-related opportunities
- How to harvest innovations for maximum results
A framework for implementing innovative ideas
- Regarding your organization as a laboratory of innovative ideas
- Experimentation and learning as a way of doing your job
- Converting ideas into action
- Integrating innovation into routine practices
Improving the processes of innovation
- Sustaining organizational innovation over time
- Signs that innovation has an uphill battle
- Guiding the tempo and uneven pace of change
- Managing for continuous innovation
- Finding the bottlenecks and constraints that block innovation
- Reducing the cycle time for innovative ideas
Measuring the value and ROI of an innovative idea
- Emerging performance measures of innovation
- How to calculate the productivity gain or “payback”
- Evaluating your idea’s progress and results
- Creating a balanced scorecard for innovation
A leadership model for innovative work groups
- The influence of your leadership skill on innovation
- Core leadership competencies for innovation
- Building the critical mass needed for systemic change
- Leading innovation projects across the organization
Managing effectively in an innovative organization
- Managing effectively at the edge of chaos
- Choosing the right people to create breakthroughs
- Techniques for giving innovation a jump start
- Timing: making things happen when they should
- Ways to reward and reinforce innovation
- Finding balance: pressures to produce vs. time for reflection
- Exercise: A behavior model for managing innovation
Building organizational support for your innovative ideas
- How to “sell your idea” to key decision-makers
- Developing strategic sponsors and partners for new ideas
- Securing organizational commitment and support
Managing the change that accompanies an innovation
- Overcoming the “not invented here” syndrome
- Guiding the tempo and uneven pace of change
- Dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity
- Managing innovation in chaotic environments
- Navigating the turbulence of changing markets
- What to do when heading into uncharted territory
- Finding the champions to take charge of an idea
- Managing for continuous innovation
Action Planning and Action Learning
- Developing an action plan for your idea
- Follow-through and follow-up
- Dealing with problems inherent in managing innovation
Managing a large scale innovation project
- Securing organization-wide support for the project
- How to lead real change across the organization
- Creating realistic work breakdowns and schedules
- Measuring, controlling and evaluating your results