Complete Innovation Skills Master Class

Design cross-functional innovation teams with a high level sponsor and resources to deliver a minimum viable product and gain customer feedback.

Learn how the minimum viable product tests a hypothesis with the smallest version and shortest development time, wireframes, prototypes, or videos to validate customer interest and reduce risk in innovation.

Brainstorm an innovative product idea and map a minimum viable product to test it, including visuals or mockups, cost estimates, target customers, feedback questions, and boss approval to test.

Understand the innovation pipeline and stage gate process to hit targets, allocate time and money, and gate ideas via rapid prototyping, balancing risk and reward for fast to market products.

Assess five criteria: customer love, technical feasibility, profitability, competition, and real need, and ruthlessly kill weaker projects based on evidence and customer feedback.

Explore force field analysis as a change management tool to map driving and restraining forces, score their impact, and plan actions to boost positives and reduce risks in projects.

Explore how command and control and lateral inspirational leadership styles differ, their strengths and drawbacks, and when to mix them to empower teams, foster innovation, and deliver long-term growth.

Assess your strengths and weaknesses by rating the innovative leader's characteristics, then identify two to three areas to improve in communication, listening, trust, and empowerment, and create an action plan.

Set a compelling vision to lead innovation, painting a future worth pursuing that inspires people, challenges them to innovate, and enables shared purpose, delegation, and creative problem solving.

Draft clear long-term vision statements for your department and the organization to guide innovation beyond weekly goals toward medium to long term success.

Learn to measure innovation with input, process, and output metrics across the funnel, from ideas to launch, using metrics like ideas generated, stage-gate pass rates, time to market, and revenue.

Set personal and departmental innovation goals, target six to twelve months, outline ideas, budget, and metrics including revenue impact to measure progress, and finish with a sheet documenting your goals.

Trust and empower employees to experiment; Ted Hoff's boss backed a risky approach that yielded the microprocessor, while Richard Branson let Ailsa Petrie lead Virgin Brides, proving empowerment drives innovation.

Give everyone two jobs: excel at their current role and find a better way to deliver value for internal and external customers, signaling leadership and driving efficiency and innovation.

Leaders learn to welcome risk and honorable failure as a learning opportunity, praise success-driven behaviors publicly when appropriate, and address obstacles privately to boost innovation culture.

Lead innovation by fighting the fear of change, engaging dialogue about risks and benefits, and conveying a clear vision to beat complacency and inspire positive change.

Break silos by building cross-functional teams with shared objectives to drive innovation. Employ secondments and social mixing, plus cafeteria lunches and water cooler conversations for sharing ideas.

Design thinking centers the customer and follows five stages—empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test—to deliver rapid, customer-centric innovations and efficient design sprints.

Master the multi-stage problem analysis process by thoroughly understanding the problem, generating ideas, selecting the best ones, testing them, and evaluating outcomes using seven analysis methods.

Learn advanced brainstorming techniques to generate 100 ideas or more in diverse, well-facilitated groups, using divergent thinking for idea generation and convergent thinking to select actionable solutions.

Develop an evaluation framework using criteria such as novel, attractive, feasible or better, simpler, cheaper, and use red, yellow, and green stickers to shortlist actionable ideas.

Explore scamper—a seven-verb brainstorming method—by applying substitute, combine, adapt, maximize, minimize, put to other use, eliminate, and rearrange to generate innovative product and service ideas.

Run a brainstorm with a diverse team to tackle a challenging issue, generate ideas, use divergent and convergent thinking to evaluate and select the best solutions, then implement.

Explore lateral thinking to drive creative problem solving by transplanting ideas from other fields, borrowing concepts like assembly lines, Velcro, and Google, and apply similes brainstorm method for cross-domain innovation.

Explore how suggestion schemes and idea management apps unlock frontline insights, show real cost savings, and sustain innovation through simple tools, campaigns, fast feedback, and executive support.

Question assumptions with the opposite approach to spark radical ideas; explore open source and low-cost alternatives, like wikipedia and linux, and apply lateral thinking to innovate.

Explore how innovation centers, labs, and incubators accelerate product development by collaborating with startups and universities, while fostering a culture of experimentation.

Explore open innovation and crowdsourcing, including a four-quadrant model and directed invitational or participative approaches, with practical examples and ten tips for success in open collaborations.

Discover open innovation and crowdsourcing through real-world platforms like PG Connect, Unilever open innovation, InnoCentive, Threadless, and Crowd Cube.

Discover the business model canvas, a nine-block framework that maps value propositions, customer segments, channels, relationships, revenue streams, resources, activities, partnerships, and costs to spark business model innovation.

Discover ten pricing innovations that transform business models, from turning products into services and demand driven pricing to auction pricing, freemium, and bundling.

Identify barriers to adoption such as compatibility, perceived value, risk, norms, and image, and use win-win trials and early adopters to drive innovation uptake.

Explore the innovator's dilemma, distinguishing sustaining and disruptive technologies, and learn how new entrants outrun incumbents through market-shaping strategies and independent subunits.

Paint the vision and set measurable goals to guide innovation; analyze problems, remove barriers, and cultivate a risk-taking culture while empowering internal ideas, open innovation, and minimum viable products.

Discover books and courses on innovation, lateral thinking, and leadership, with problem analysis, brainstorming, six thinking hats, and the Disney method, plus instructor contact details.