Suggested Length: Three Days

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