Innovation Training and Certification

Our highly interactive courses feature hours of personalized practice and coaching, with individual and group exercises, group simulation, excursions and practice interviews. An extensive set of training materials is provided to facilitate learning and serves as a reference when participants take what they have learned back to their own places of work. Take home tools and materials you can apply directly to your innovation program. Training is preferably an integral part of projects with client teams.

We offer:

Creating the Customer Connection: Ethnographic and Observational Research Training

Gaining an in-depth understanding of your customers and their environment is one of the most important factors in creating a product or service. This high-energy interactive workshop will help you to understand new and exciting tools for connecting with your customer using methods taken from anthropology and ethnography. Experiential learning and case studies will be used to teach the basic theories and techniques used in field and participant observation. You will learn to recognize the customer’s voice and put that voice into action in your approach to business.

 

Facilitating New Product Discovery: Innovation Project Management and Focused Innovation Technique Training

The Innovation Project Management and Focused Innovation Technique (F.I.T.) training brings together a small group from your company or several companies for 2½ days of experiential learning. The Focused Innovation Technique is a proven ten-step process for facilitating creative problem-solving and idea generation targeted at new product concept creation. The F.I.T. encourages groups to be creative while building on each other’s expertise in a high-energy process that promotes team spirit and the alignment necessary to support implementing the results. Innovation Project Management helps you to target the right challenges in the right way.

 

Building an Innovation Culture: The Creative U

Innovation Focus will help you tap into the large body of work and approaches from the many minds that contribute to our knowledge and practice for creating and sustaining a culture for innovation within your organization. We will introduce you to functional frameworks for building, sustaining and enhancing an innovation culture. You will review an extensive menu of tools and techniques for individuals and teams to use to stimulate creativity.You will return to your organization with realistic steps and processes for a clear understanding of actions to grow your organization’s culture for innovation.

 

NPDP Certification Credits!

For those interested in receiving or maintaining their NPDP certification, each course in the Discovering Discovery Training Series is 20 hours of instructional material  within the Product Development and Management Association’s Body of Knowledge.

 

Digital Ethnography

Gaining an in-depth understanding of your customers and their online lives is an important factor in creating any product or service. This virtual, interactive workshop will help you to understand new and exciting tools for connecting to your customer by combining methods taken from anthropology, ethnography and the internet. Experiential learning will be used to teach basic techniques during the class. Participants can expect to make significant headway in the design and test of a digital ethnography project.

Four-Hour Interactive Workshops

Innovation 101: Getting Started 

Innovation is a process and a culture, not a strategy. It is a tool to be used, not an end-point in itself. Learn how best-in-class organizations innovate. Tap into the large body of work and research from the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. Discuss ways in which this innovation success record can be applied to government, your agency or the private sector. Understand the skills and tools necessary to drive a successful innovation program. Walk away with concrete next steps for your agency, including the business case for adopting proven innovation management tools.

Where Great Ideas Come From: The Focused Innovation Technique

The Focused Innovation Technique™ (FIT) is a tool designed to help you take charge of your brainstorming meeting, and get to ideas—and from ideas, to action.  Brainstorming gets a bad rap because we often think that creativity has to be free flowing and less structured than a regular meeting. The truth is, creativity is helped by structure, just like almost every other human endeavor.  The Focused Innovation Technique was developed to help technical professionals find new solutions to complex problems.  Learn how to get the ideas you want, when you want them.

Killing Sacred Cows: An Innovation Necessity

Killing Sacred Cows can be a complicated and difficult process. Sacred cows are big, slow moving, and there are a lot more of them than there are of you. These cows stop traffic, eliminate change as an opportunity, and lead to a sense of personal and organizational futility. Sacred cows are the idea killers when, what you want, are killer ideas. It is important to remember that almost all of us have our own herd of sacred cows and seeing our herd is the first step in tackling the problem of organizational inertia.  Sponsor a high energy, experience-driven session.

Building a Culture for Innovation

Building a culture for innovation can seem like an elusive goal. There is, however, a large body of knowledge, as well as tools and techniques, we can all use for creating and sustaining a culture for innovation. Organizations each have their own style in dealing with the challenges presented by innovation. Understanding and helping an organization starts with understanding your own preferences and approach. This class will focus on building your understanding, skills and enthusiasm for facilitating the creation of a culture of innovation. It will be a highly interactive and experiential.

Crafting Compelling Concepts

Writing world-class concepts is both an art and a science. This class will cover the fundamentals of going from an idea to a final and fully-baked concept. Explore how concepts can be leveraged to inform and challenge an organization’s innovation process. We will discuss how concepts are structured, customized and allowed to grow as they make their way through your idea-killing organization into an idea-hungry market.