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    Creating a Culture of Innovation

    Adapt to changing realities in order to thrive

    While Strategic Market-Based Planning and Business Model Renewal introduces high-level issues related to corporate culture change, this course dives in deeper. It defines skills required for diagnosing individual and organizational responsiveness to change, and explores innovativeness in product development and customer value delivery.

    The course takes a unique layered approach to innovation. It starts with a personal self-examination of your own creativity and leadership as inputs into a culture of innovation. Next, it progresses to tools for innovating customer value. Finally, it ends with insights into building and sustaining organizational innovation.

    This course will teach you how to:

    • Remove the filters that block your creativity
      The human brain is designed to recognize patterns. This can be both a strength and a weakness as it relates to creativity. Find out how to balance them.
    • Maximize your role in driving innovation
      People are at the heart of innovation, and how well you lead them will have a significant impact on the potential for success. Think about how you solve problems and make decisions. Is your approach consistent with good innovation?
    • Broaden voice-of-the-customer sources
      The more tools you leverage for customer insights, the more innovative your products and services are likely to be. Consider ethnography, lead users, netnography, and other approaches to get a deeper understanding of the market.
    • Reshape the product innovation process
      Collaboration is rapidly becoming a common component of new ideas. Consider whether open innovation, co-creation, and other collaboration tools might help you.
    • Overcome strategic inertia
      Nurture passion. Make work matter. Provide time for enhanced creativity. Surround yourself with intellectual and social diversity to spark imagination.
    • Design agile structures and methods
      Build the capacity for change into the core of your organization. Identify formal and informal structures, and identify levers for transforming them.

    Who should attend?

    This course is for individuals who lead, manage, or are involved with innovation on any level within an organization, including:

    • Strategic planners
    • Product developers
    • Organizational behavior executives
    • Marketing researchers

    Day 1: Awaken Your Personal Creative and Leadership Potential

    “If you always think the way you’ve always thought, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” Is that what you want? Learn how to gag your inner judge.

      Creative thinking techniques

      • Learn what creativity is and why it is teachable
      • Compare traditional and contemporary creativity systems
      • Develop an “opportunity mindset” by building a toolkit of new approaches

      Creative thinking applications

      • Formulate unconventional problem-solving approaches
      • Rethink decision making
      • Become a catalyst for leading innovation

      Day 2: Innovate Customer Value

      Once you understand the essence of creativity and innovation, emphasis will shift to using them to increase customer value.

      Innovative market sensing

      • Detect market signals and trends
      • Unlock new customer insights by moving beyond traditional research
      • Test market-driven and market-driving frameworks

      Product and service innovation

      • Discover open innovation and disruptive techniques
      • Balance radical and incremental innovation
      • Identify potential new revenue streams

      Day 3: Build and Sustain an Organizational Culture of Innovation

      On the final day, you’ll explore how to move innovation to a level of ongoing performance.

      Develop human capacity for innovative change

      • Identify and transform limiting assumptions and obstacles
      • Leverage learning and innovation collaboration
      • Harness informal networks
      • Improve innovation-readiness

      Maintain the spirit of innovation

      • Diversify inputs and infuse the organization with different viewpoints
      • Invest in problem-solving skills and creativity of rank-and-file employees
      • Build appropriate procedures and incentives
      • Provide required tools and support

      As part of the Executive Education faculty for the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Linda Gorchels is responsible for the financial performance of and long-term strategy for the marketing program. She had previous strategy responsibility in the insurance, publishing, and robotics industries, and has provided strategy consulting or training to such organizations as Trane Commercial Systems, Kerry Group, University of Wisconsin-Extension and CUNA Service Group. Gorchels has been published in the Journal of International Marketing, the Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, the Journal of Contemporary Business Issues, and Industrial Marketing Management. She is co-author of The Manager’s Guide to Distribution Channels, and is author of The Product Manager’s Handbook and The Product Manager’s Field Guide.