Innovation for Financial Managers

Course details

Finance is at the heart of any well-run company, analysing, tracking, controlling and allocating resources across the normal range of activities.

But how do finance professionals know whether a new initiative is worth supporting? What evidence is there that a new process, product or service will work, and how soon will we know? How can we pick and choose between new and untested possibilities?

If you have responsibility for allocating resources to new initiatives, or would like to know how you can check on the healthy progress of new initiatives amongst a portfolio, this course will help you understand how innovative teams work and the techniques they use.

Learning Outcomes

• Once you complete this course, you should be able to:
• identify and understand appropriate innovation techniques such as customer understanding, idea generation and prototyping
• be an effective member of innovation teams as they explore new possibilities
• support organisational innovation efforts through effective pipeline management, including project culling and capacity management

Who Should Attend

• Finance personnel who support departmental or team-level innovation activities should attend this course so they understand what their teams are doing and how well they are carrying out their work.

Course Content

Participants will study:

• how innovation is managed as part of a standard financial cycle
• an innovation team case study: good innovation practices are examined and participants create their own innovation techniques audit checklist, one of the course takeaway tools.
• project experience: participants walk through an innovation project in real time, trying out the key techniques themselves, which helps to develop a ‘feel’ for appropriate activities.
• pipeline management: participants identify appropriate update points in the project process and how to manage the innovation project pipeline.
• The course will include guest speakers from industry, who will share their experience of topical innovation subjects, such as product innovation, ICT and financial services innovation and working with innovation in the shadow of risk and compliance.