Outline – Innovation

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

Contact us today!

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