What You Should Be Learning in Innovation Training
But you probably are not!
Eleven Innovation Bullets to Dodge, in no particular order.
- Lack of Managment support will effectively kill any innovation program no matter how well conceived.
- If you don’t have Talent, superior talent, you’ll fail.
- Design Thinking alone will not guarantee success (or any other framework, Agile, Lean, etc.).
- Very few organization’s are any good at all at Brainstorming/Idea Generation.
- If you don’t take calculated risks, and continue to take them, you will fail.
- Most organization’s don’t have the guts to actually reinvent.
- Innovation team leaders who avoid conflict are doomed to fail.
- B to B organization’s need to learn what qualitative research is all about.
- B to C organization’s need to learn to interpret qualitative data more creatively.
- Digital technology innovation is an opportunity where most organization’s will be too late to the party.
- If your innovation program doesn’t have a Project orientation there will be no culture change, or innovation.
A lot of innovation training is happy talk, or super-wonky detail talk. Framework training is useful, but you can get into the weeds and get killed if you don’t have other fundamentals sorted out. Much innovation training avoids talking about the pitfalls that will absolutely kill your program.
This is a short post, so, I’m not going to elaborate much on the above. Happy to do that on the phone, or in a talk or discussion with your group. Suffice to say, some of these bullets are debatable, but trust me on this, most of them are not. If you’re not addressing these problems/opportunities, in some fashion, you’re in fail mode.
These Bullets Can Be Dodged
Get innovation training from an experienced source, someone who has actually created innovation, both inside large companies and as an entrepreneur. That’s me, Gregg Fraley of GFi. The one advantage of losing all my hair is I can help others dodge bullets and succeed.
Here’s my word and my truth: I won’t feed you happy talk in my training (although it will be fun). I’ll tell you what you really need to know to succeed. Let me help you dodge these eleven bullets. If you don’t find my training valuable I’ll refund your fees.