A range of interactive workshops on Innovation from 1 to 5 days. Co-produced by Brendan Dunphy and Paul May.

“Just as we learned not to depend on a few brave souls to feed and cloth us (and the feast and famine that went with it), so we need to learn to farm innovations and integrate the process into the fabric of our business."

Brendan Dunphy

Why farm (and not hunt) Innovation? 

Companies need to innovate more often and more effectively; Innovation used to be about new products, R&D and technology. Now its about the whole business and embraces change, the customer and value creation as well as new products & services.

Most companies can only innovate sporadically and apparently by "chance"; failure rates are high and expensive, innovation creates conflict with the existing business and innovation 'hunters' are few on the ground (its a risky business to be a lone innovator...).

The answer to this challenge is to move innovation to the next level - from hunting to farming. Just as we learned not to depend on a few brave souls to feed and cloth us (and the feast and famine that went with it), so we need to learn to farm innovations and integrate the process into the fabric of our business.

This programme does not intend to create the next intrepid band of 'hunters'; it is designed to raise the innovation capabilities of the organisation and equip participants with the knowledge and tools to transform the way they view innovation, its role and value to the business: in short, to stop hunting innovations and to start farming them! 

Participants will learn:

• The leading theories of innovation and their relevance to them
• The differences between innovation and creativity
• A toolbox of innovation techniques
• What innovation strategies are available?
• Innovation best practice from around the globe
• What is the relationship between Innovation & Business strategy?
• How to apply innovation techniques personally and in teams
• How to create repeatable processes to deliver continuous innovation
• To manage innovation processes and assess outcomes
• To integrate and connect innovation with leadership, reward & value systems
• To identify potential sources of competitive innovation advantage
• To create an environment that nurtures innovation
• To embed innovation within business processes

Who should attend?  

Senior staff and management from Technology, Marketing, Product Management, R&D and other core functions needing to increase their innovation capabilities to change in response to their strategy, competitors and customers.

Workshop Overview 

The programme is highly flexible and designed to meet the specific needs of the customer and delegates when provided as an in-house program. Specific outlines are available for public programs run on a regular basis by us or partners. Below is a typical outline for the two-day workshop.   

Day 1

• Understanding innovation
  · Identifying the pressure to innovate
  · Assessing the competitive environment and calibrating clock-speed
  · Tracking decay in existing markets and solutions
  · Relating innovation to leadership
  · Aligning innovation and strategy
• Learning from winners - and losers
  · Extracting key behaviours of leading corporate innovators
  · Tracing the lifecycle of innovations
  · Analysing success and failure factors
  · Creating an organisational narrative of innovation
• Defining innovation
  · Applying the standard theories of innovation
  · Managing the relationship between creativity and risk
  · Comparing evolutionary and disruptive innovation
  · Choosing between proprietary and modular architectures
  · Building an innovation process from concept to delivery
• Tapping sources of innovation
  · Spotting the seven sources of innovative opportunity
  · Acquiring and using customer insight
  · Managing customer-led change
  · Harnessing creative talents
  · Evaluating options for investment
• Releasing creativity
  · Learning to be creative
  · Unlearning uncreativity
  · Building and running an ideas factory
  · Analysing the innovation fulcrum

Day 2

• Searching the opportunity space
  · Using K-cycles and S-waves
  · Finding the forces underlying change
  · Tolerating ambiguity and detecting its opportunities
  · Letting go of what works
  · Seeing for yourself and probing common knowledge
• Introducing innovations to market
  · Designing total solutions
  · Creating pull markets
  · Controlling connected markets
  · Choosing launch windows
  · Outpacing imitators
  · Turning first-mover advantage into sustained leadership
• Modelling innovation's role in the organisation
  · Relating R&D to innovation
  · Outsourcing the innovation process
  · Building coalitions for change
  · Permissioning the organisation to innovate
• Institutionalising innovation
  · Overcoming organisational hurdles
  · Aligning values with organisational culture and personal motivation
  · Evaluating and redesigning business processes
  · Selecting and deploying tools
  · Designing metrics, reward systems and management intervention strategies

Give us a call to discuss how best you can utilise this program to achieve your goals.