Innovation Leading the Way

Course details

At certain levels in an organisation, we are no longer briefed on our next project topic or guided to success. We ourselves must define the challenges and opportunities that will focus our departments and teams.

At a high level, innovation and design-thinking methods are useful for setting strategy and direction in an informed, intuitive and collaborative manner. Once project briefs are set, the same techniques are employed by teams at a more resolved level to create innovative, appropriate, and even delightful products, services, features and changes.

If you are responsible for setting strategy and direction, or for leading teams that must go beyond having new ideas, and on to setting them into motion and guiding them through implementation, this course provides an opportunity to be coached through direction-finding and exploration for one specific project. The project can be of your own choosing or assigned. Through it you will gain hands-on experience that will inform your work and your teams’ work, and will allow you to build a more complete Innovation and design-thinking toolkit, doubling the fundamental tools assembled in the 6-day course.

If you have responsibility for directing, leading or participating in innovation, product or service development, or customer experience design teams, this course is for you. Note that this programme requires significant time investment beyond the 10 class days to apply techniques to real projects

How can this programme benefit you and your organisation?

Once you complete this course, you should be able to:

• use innovation and design-thinking methods as applied to strategic and tactical project work
• mould innovation techniques to suit your company culture and to fit into the standard company armoury of tools and processes
• create a complete toolkit of innovation techniques that span from pre-concept to bridging-to-execution

You’ll have repeatable, practical and inspirational processes to answer the questions “What projects should we work on?”, “How do we get from an idea to an excellent set of product and service requirements that all our departments understand?” and “How can we keep our vision intact through execution?”

Who could do this course?

Staff responsible for hiring and managing innovation and customer experience design personnel; managers and directors who want to build this competency in their organisation and develop their own deeper understanding of it; people who would like to go deeper than “practitioner level” provided by the 6-day programme.

What is in the course?

Participants will study:

• innovation and design-thinking techniques at a strategic level to explore potential opportunities and use portfolio evaluation to select a direction forward.
• innovators and product/service developers in small and large financial services companies about their own experiences.
• the fundamental and extended set of innovation and design-thinking tools on one project, either assigned in the course or brought in by the participant. The eight fundamental tools will include customer ethnography, cross-pollination, opportunity mapping, business model canvas, and prototyping. The extended set will include innovation ecosystem mapping, project brief template, and experience blueprint.
• assembling the complete innovation toolkit that would suit your organisation’s needs.
• learning by teaching: choose one method to trial with people outside our course.

What else will be involved in the course?

Pre-work: Participants are surveyed for their innovation understanding and goals prior to the course. We provide pre-reading materials. Participants should enter the course with a selected project. Prework on this project will be assigned.

During the course, participants will typically carry out homework between each course day, to apply the techniques to their selected project in preparation for our next session which will involve coaching on project progress as well as new techniques. Pre-reading will be required for each day.

Promising projects will have a design student linked with them to support their prototyping efforts.