Applied Innovation Masterclass: Tools to Transform & Thrive

Cultivate curiosity and imagination to explore opportunities, build knowledge, think critically, and apply perseverance, resources, and time to transform ideas into innovations.

Realize that formal education, degrees, and titles are not required to innovate; embrace self-education and online courses, as shown by the MIT challenge.

discover how field exposure sparks innovations by talking with people and observing product use, with the doritos origin story exemplifying opportunities everywhere.

Explore how real-world constraints drive ingenuity by combining the inner and outer catheter walls to reduce outer diameter and increase inner area, while keeping wall thickness unchanged.

Journey mapping visualizes the end-to-end customer experience as a timeline of actions, thoughts, and emotions across all touchpoints and multi-channel journey phases, to reveal insights and reduce friction.

Postmortems help teams objectively review a completed product or project to identify what went right and what went wrong, mandatory after every project to boost future capabilities.

Apply a pre-mortem, imagining a project failure to surface risks with a diverse group, list and discuss reasons, then mitigate risks to reduce overconfidence and boost team effectiveness and success.

Explore design thinking's five-stage model: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, to understand human needs, collaborate with customers, and iteratively craft practical, user-centered solutions.

Develop innovations by separating divergent thinking, which generates many ideas, from convergent thinking, which winnows them down, and apply a yes-and mindset to build on incoming concepts.

Think in new boxes to fuel innovation; apply five steps—doubt, probe the possible, imagine your company disappeared, converge, and evaluate relentlessly—illustrated by Bic, Edison, Fosbury Flop, Reuters.

Explore how design thinking and cross-industry inspiration improve end user experience, from collapsible baby carriages to GE adventure MRI, iDrive inspired by video game controllers, and Dyson’s cyclone vacuum.

Explore scamper, a structured ideation mnemonic that uses substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and reverse to generate diverse product ideas from an existing product.

Invite others to collaborate and contribute, harnessing the power of collective input. Collaborate widely online to enable thousands to contribute ideas and content, expanding knowledge like Wikipedia.

Cultivate a positive mindset for ideating by creating a friendly, accepting environment where people are kind, pleasant, and encouraging, and remember to smile and have fun.

Identify the dark side of innovation by recognizing common killers, criticism, apathy, jealousy, limited resources, politics, aversion to change, ignorance, and fear, and push through with hard work and awareness.

Learn to distinguish business model from core competency. Blockbuster and Kodak illustrate how focusing on core capabilities and adapting models sustains value.

Examine why great firms stumble when facing disruptive tech, as the innovator's dilemma forces balancing sustaining revenue with investing in uncertain, smaller-market innovations.

Zone two products impose an hourglass constraint that drains resources and delays revenue. Moore's Zone to Win urges a CEO-led shift in priorities to move horizon two products to market.

Explore how diffusion of innovations explains how ideas spread across five adopter groups, from innovators to laggards, and how crossing the chasm uses a beachhead to reach the mainstream.

Prototype early and test often to gather real-world feedback and learn what to improve. Involve the market early to avoid gaps that only show up after a late internal unveiling.

Define the minimum viable product as a version with just enough core features to satisfy early adopters and gather rapid feedback for iterative prototyping toward a desirable product-market fit.

Explore the profit model as a key area of innovation, highlighted in the ten types of innovation, with examples like printers and cartridges, freemium software, subscriptions, and razors and blades.

Build value by expanding your network across internal and external partners, using technology to manage input from diverse sources and focus on core strengths, with opportunities on Upwork or Fiverr.

Explore how organizational structure shapes performance by aligning people, departments, and reporting with productive work environments. Consider milestones: autonomous divisions and employee-owned models like W. L. Gore.

Identify how process methodology and workflow drive process innovations and competitive advantage by delivering product design, production, sales, and customer management, with examples from Coca-Cola, Zara, and Walmart.

Discover how product performance differentiates design, features, and functionality through incremental and disruptive innovation, one of ten areas, with an atypical example of personalized M&Ms imprinted with a grandmother's name.

Learn how product systems create a strategic ecosystem by integrating complementary products and services that synergize and work together, as seen in Microsoft and Google software suites and Apple's iTunes.

Innovate customer support to dramatically improve the customer journey by educating customers on capabilities and features, turning interactions into enthusiasts and elevating brand value.

Discover how to innovate distribution channels to reach customers efficiently, from distributors to direct sales and partners, via online and in-person experiences with timely information, convenient solutions, and reduced costs.

Explore how brand shapes customer feelings, delivering a trusted promise on quality and delivery. Innovate brand identity to attract customers and boost business value, like Doc Martens or Mercedes Benz.

Explore customer experience innovations that focus on how customers use the product to deliver an easy, intuitive experience that over delivers, illustrated by the Magic Castle Hotel popsicle hotline.

Stanley Black & Decker's Flexvolt system aligns structure, strategy, culture, and process to power 20V to 120V tools on a single 15-battery, backwards-compatible platform, driving $300 million in incremental sales.

Learn how top innovators align business and innovation strategy, foster culture, and involve leadership. Explore how customer involvement and objective metrics combine to deliver six characteristics that enchant the customer.

Identify vanity metrics and prioritize actionable indicators that genuinely influence business success, avoiding follower counts and other metrics that look impressive but don’t drive results.

Identify meaningful metrics aligned with business goals across growth stages, from visibility metrics to sales performance, and track actionable improvements that truly impact the business.

Explore the innovation of you through intentional evolution, the invisible growth factor, daily 1% growth, and continuous reinvention to achieve sustained performance.

Celebrate completing the applied innovation master class and treat the end as the beginning. Nurture your creative capacity, continually evolve, and innovate despite fear, nostalgia, or complacency.