A brief post to make sure you know about the upcoming Denver, CO public course in Advanced Innovation Facilitation.  This is a high value training. It’s partially sponsored so the price is much lower than usual. Here’s a page with details.

It’s next week Starting Wednesday February 1, continuing on Feb 2, finishing at noon on Feb. 3rd.

Essentially this is intensive, hands-on workshop that trains people in innovation frameworks, and tools for strategy, ideation, research, and project management. It’s being held at the Community Research Center and I’m working with CO local Kim Smoyer of Smoyer & Associates.

It’s a course for innovation project managers, consultants, intrapreneurs, and entrepreneurs who want to have more productive strategy, idea generation, and innovation action plans. If you’re with a non-profit you might find that this training is the perfect thing for creating better services and experiences for your support bases — and how about better ideas for fund-raising? I’ll touch on topics like innovation frameworks (including Design Thinking), cycles, team formation, Challenge Mapping, usage of trends and research, idea generation or brainstorming techniques, idea or concept development, usage of story and improvisation, and more.

One very different aspect of this training is the time spent on exploring how to do Concept Blending. This is how innovation is created, by blending heretofor not combined concepts. It’s almost magic, and yet it’s nearly always left to chance. Master trainer Gregg Fraley (yes that’s me) will show you how to scaffold thinking of a group towards amazing innovative concept combinations.

Blowing my own horn here but you’ll be hard pressed to find a better preparation course to manage innovation projects and sessions.  Ask the folks at Hershey, YUM, Johnsonville Sausage, University of Chicago, and Sanofi Pharma — they’ve all taken the course. One reason is they are now able to facilitate their own strategy and ideation sessions, that can save a lot of money.

Register through CRC here.

I hope to see you next week, please write or call if you want more detail. 773-251-8567.