Doing business today means confronting pressures and challenges on all fronts:
• The globalization of commercial networks and infrastructures
• Industries in flux as industries converge and new ones are introduced
• A buyer-driven economy in which customer needs are ever changing and demand is unpredictable
• Shorter product life cycles as competition accelerates the pace of imitation
• A marketplace in which the power of brands gives way to the power of the customer’s experience

Leaders must not only successfully navigate these challenges, but do so within the context of financial markets that are more demanding than ever.

It’s clear that productivity initiatives, process improvement, downsizing, and other reduction-oriented endeavors can only take an organization so far. The viability of an organization depends upon innovation.

For organizations needing to accelerate growth and achieve critical business objectives, Leading Innovation: From Concept to Customer Value™ provides supervisors, team leads, managers, and middle managers from all functional areas with a framework, best practices, and tools required to make innovation pay off. Leading Innovation is best suited for leaders who:

• Are expected to engage employees and others to come up with new and innovative ways to provide value to internal and external customers
• Make decision about innovations to pursue and those to stop
• Are responsible for implementing innovation and managing obstacles and roadblocks that occur

Unlike many programs that concentrate exclusively on creativity and/or the ‘fuzzy front end,’ Leading Innovation: From Concept to Customer Value™ develops skills and competencies around building a culture of innovation as well as the capability to manage and facilitate a process that will bring results to a new level. This process not only helps participants understand their role as innovative leaders, it also helps create a common language and serves as a critical focal point for appropriately prioritizing and deploying the effort and energy of all involved.

Unit 1 – The Heart of Innovation

After actively participating in this unit, participants will be
able to:
• Define innovation for their organization, pointing to specific examples of various forms of innovation
• List the challenges they face to creating and supporting innovative results
• Explain how creativity and execution drive innovation success
• Evaluate their organization’s culture relative to innovation
• List actions they can take to create a culture of innovation

Unit 2 – Your Role in Innovation

After actively participating in this unit, participants will be able
to:
• Apply a structured process to promote innovation/create a common language
• Describe the key role individual leader commitment plays in innovation success
• Take high impact actions to demonstrate their commitment to innovation

Unit 3 – Optimizing Diversity

After actively participating in this unit, participants will be
able to:
• Define the impact diversity can have on quality and quantity of idea generation
• Identify and tap into sources of innovative ideas
• Identify the mix of perspectives, skill sets, and capabilities that maximize diversity

Unit 4 – Sparking New Thinking

After actively participating in this unit, participants will be
able to:
• Take action to broaden exposure to inputs that fuel innovative thinking
• Identify ways to bring the customer perspective into the innovation process
• Challenge perspectives that block new thinking

Unit 5 – Shaping and Selecting Ideas

After actively participating in this unit, participants will be
able to:
• Define the two ends of the protect/promote continuum and explain the conditions demanding each
• List leadership actions along the protect/promote continuum
• Practice a conversational model that helps to advance ideas at any stage of development
• Explain the essential nature of messy learning
• Suggest a range of messy learning actions to advance concepts, helping to prove or disprove their viability

Unit 6 – Executing Innovation

After actively participating in this unit, participants will be
able to:
• Explain the hallmarks of implementation success
• Assess their organization’s ability to effectively execute innovative ideas
• List criteria and steps for appropriately terminating the execution of an innovation
• Plan personal actions for supporting innovation within their organizations