Innovation Practitioners

Course details

Efforts toward innovation, product and service re-design, and customer experience design require trained staff who can apply innovation and design-thinking methods to successfully complete multiple projects.

Teams undertaking innovation and change projects work best with a shared process that includes gap-finding and inspiration-seeking in the areas of technology, business and human needs, followed by integration of insights into viable concepts and features that meet customer needs.

Many companies task teams with innovation and improvement, without giving them solid processes and techniques to find an optimal direction before implementing a solution. This 6-day course provides innovation and design-thinking fundamentals for such teams, framed within the financial services industry.

If you have responsibility for leading or participating in innovation, product or service development, or customer experience design teams, this course is for you

Learning Outcomes

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

• Apply fundamental innovation and design-thinking methods across multiple industry-relevant topics
• Appreciate how innovation techniques can be moulded to suit your company culture and to fit into the standard company armoury of tools and processes
• Understand the history of innovation in the financial services industry
• Lead or participate in an innovation, re-design, or customer experience design project using a repeatable, rational and inspirational process that supports customer knowledge and stakeholder buy-in

Who could do this course (as opposed to who should)?

• 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 “immersion and awareness” provided by the 2-day course.

Course content

Participants will study:

• An overview of financial services innovation, particularly its history, the frameworks for innovation, and the types of processes and structures that are put in place to support it in an organisation.
• The experiences of innovators and product/service developers in small and large companies.
• A larger suite of innovation tools and methods, and focus on a particular foundational set of eight that will be practised on three mini-projects. The eight will include customer ethnography, cross-pollination, opportunity mapping, business model canvas, and prototyping.
• The fundamental innovation toolkit that would suit your project teams’ needs.
• Your organisation’s innovation level through a survey that points towards the next steps in developing the organisation’s innovation competency.