Learning solutions to help global companies build that innovation muscle, nudge the culture into place, grow existing products or businesses, and design big ideas for the future.
LEARN ON SITE AS A TEAM:
LEARN AT SCALE AS AN ORGANIZATION:
LEARN BY INNOVATING:
You lead people. It’s your job to help them succeed. And your success means their success. You want them to come up with better ideas every day and when it really counts, but you don’t want them rolling their eyes when you introduce another consultant-led process or airport bookshelf self-help book. And you don’t want to send them to another course hoping they can bring it back and assimilate it later.
It has to be practical, your team members have to see the value, and it has to produce results.
Our work-embedded approaches to coming up with really big value ideas are your not-so-secret professional development recipe.
What people are saying
These tools and approaches have had incredible impact on our organization. As an executive responsible for innovation at a technology company I have been to many seminars and events trying to improve our ability to innovate.
These have been the most impactful we have used. Our team is now having deeper more constructive conversations about innovation. We’re creating innovative and powerful ideas beyond what we historical have produced.
We were using them within hours and they now have become an integral part of our organization.
I highly recommend this approach to anyone trying to create innovation inside their organization.
I used to think that the whole concept of ‘innovation’ or thinking creatively was for the artists, engineers and of course, the designers out there … winning ideas seemed to ‘just happen’ to everyone else. Likewise, it seemed I was often trying to take my ideas straight from ‘napkin to business plan’; I felt frustrated with the process and was rarely happy with the results.
With these approaches, I learned to stop seeing my ideas as fixed entities out of my control, but instead as ripe ‘opportunities’ with the potential to grow into those fantastic, winning ventures by my deliberately designing them to be. I now see all along I was missing valuable opportunities to prototype and workshop my ideas into winning ones. I wish I could have experienced this years ago! Don’t expect to sit back and simply be told what to do … an integral part of the learning experience is to roll up your sleeves and dive right in, creating and exploring throughout.
Thank you … I feel the learning has only just begun!
- 0:00 – Who is Kevin Crowe, Executive VP Strategy at Long View Systems?
- 0:47 – What problem were you trying to solve?
- 1:48 – What were you doing before, and what’s changed?
- 3:08 – How did you build a business where the best ideas win?
- 4:26 – What kinds of outcomes have you seen?
- 5:19 – How did all of this improve your team dynamics and culture?
- 6:45 – Did it really turn ‘innovation’ from a talking point into action?
- 7:58 – Can you give us an example of something tangible you stood up?
- 9:01 – Do you have a message for leaders trying to make innovation real?
- 10:28 – How will it fit within my context?
- 11:09 – How quickly can someone make this happen?
Deeply-engaging sleeves-rolled-up on-site workshops
Learn on site
as a team
Go deeper with our hands-on in-house workshops over a one, two, or three-day period. Roll up your sleeves. Be challenged. Be supported. Learn and break through.
We’ve spoken and delivered workshops around the world – from Moscow to Mexico to Mason City and many places in between (including Google!).
You’ll start by learning the key concepts and getting some basic training on the tools, then immediately apply them through practical exercises in contexts that foster collaboration.
Too many seminars and courses leave you waiting or wishing for application. We’ll get you beyond the stuff of the articles and airport bookstore self-help books – which tend to answer the questions of WHAT innovation is and WHY it’s important – to knowing exactly HOW to do it.
Our approaches will have people taking action and making things happen.
Accelerated Experience Academy
Learn at scale as an organization
Deepen and scale your training experience with our multi-week blended courses which can include online lessons, in-person team work, support from coaches, and guidance on how to keep people mutually accountable to the learning and to the innovation outcomes you’re after.
The Accelerated Experience Academy is a custom blend of these approaches to deliver a deep, accelerated, and culture shifting learning experience.
Think of it as a combination of the best of the best university level courses with engaging and practical experience gaining – done right in and for your own context. Combine our in-person workshops and exercises with our online courses through a custom design to result in what we call Work Embedded Education and Accelerated Experience Gaining.
We’ll arm your team with a suite of practical canvases, validation methodologies, and simple collaboration tools, to guide them from one step to the next and to support them immediately applying what they’re learning in their jobs.
Combine all of this with our Work Embedded Education Degrees (WEE Degrees) for those who see value in encouraging accountability for the learning through certification.
You can’t avoid gaining experience, but you can accelerate the process. Achieve customization at scale so your team members can make that happen.
Before you business model – or dive into planning, or lean startup, or design thinking. Give the foundation needed to leap into those later:
Get your team creating streams of value:
Forget that you’re learning and innovating via Work Embedded Education and Accelerated Experience Gaining:
Run an Idea Sprint and Idea Pressure Test
Learn by innovating
The Idea Sprint and Idea Pressure Test experiences are a version of what you find above, finely focused on strategic ideation and innovation efficiency – i.e. getting you as quickly as possible to a place where you’re spending your limited time and resources on the right things.
Through these experiences we make it our goal to get your team from ‘implementing ideas right’ to also ‘implementing the right ideas’.
This includes providing engaged experiences with our tools and methodologies, deliberately connecting the dots to other well known approaches (in UX, product management, marketing, lean startup, design thinking, and agile development), and hitting the ground running with experiences that help build and reinforce the practice.
No matter how good your team members are or how well they might learn as individuals, things won’t move forward unless one also fosters the right culture and mindset, and common language. So we’ll also show you how to do this while retaining and attracting people to it – and set you up for doing this kind of work on your own so idea sprinting can be part of your everyday.