Innovation Flywheel (Basic Innovation/FEI Training)

Are you formalizing your innovation program?

Do you need assistance in getting a new, young, or inexperienced team up to innovation speed?

Innovation Flywheel — Basic Innovation/FEI Training

This course is a one day immersion into the world of formal innovation. It starts at the very beginning, backgrounds participants in the state of the art in FEI (Front-End-of-Innovation) theory and practice. It’s an ideal course for a just-forming team, new department, or new innovation initiative. It provides guidelines and ideas for an organization to create their own innovation process. It assumes participants are involved in their organizations process, or soon will be. Ideally this course is customized to an organizations specific context. This course can be coupled with consulting or hands-on workshops.

Here are the essential elements of the interactive Flywheel course:

  1. Defining Innovation
    1. Product, service, or process
    2. Incremental
    3. Disruptive
    4. The proper mix for your organization
  2. Why creativity and innovation are essential to organizational survival
    • Disaster stories
    • Success stories
  3. Addressing the complexity of innovation
    1. Why even highly resourced organizations often fail
    2. How to avoid the most common pitfalls
  4. Getting started with a new program (or revitalizing a program)
    • The Four “P’s” of organizational creativity
    • Assessing and improving innovation culture
    • CPS as a framework for innovation programs
    • Usage of virtual tools such as Idea Management Systems and Idea Campaigns
  5. Where to begin and innovation team formation
    • Why diversity is essential and creative style assessment
    • Team roles
    • Managing conflict
  6. Gaining agreement on process and mandates from executive leadership
    • Agreement on objectives
    • Cycle expectations
    • Level of engagement and specifics of engagement
  7. Flywheel Front-End-of-Innovation Process
    • Classic Stage-Gate pipeline
    • Process/cycle design
    • Idea Generation
    • Prototyping & Testing
    • Activity tracking and reporting
  8. Management Pitches
    • Concept writing
    • Compelling presentations
  9. Research Methodologies
    • Observational/Ethnographic
    • Qualitative
    • Quantitative
  10. Pilot Projects
  11. Learning from Failure
    • Reducing risk
    • Documentation
    • Hand-off to operations
    • Celebrating both failure and success