Innovative Leader
What makes a leader innovative? How do they enable their organizations to innovate? The route to these destinations can be straightforward and surefire. When we team with clients to build innovation capabilities, we tailor interventions to your context – there is no generic program. However, the engagement does follow four clear steps:
Begin with building a clear understanding about what innovation means to your organization, what issues you want innovation to address, what kinds of outputs are sought, and how your goals might relate to other factors like employee engagement and retention, Board involvement, and more
Audit your company’s innovation capabilities and compare them against relevant benchmarks to pinpoint areas of strength and opportunity
Co-design ways to make your organization more innovative, which might encompass elements such as getting closer to customers, developing better project management processes, clarifying internal roles, fostering cross-company collaboration, and enabling rapid experimentation
Embed these approaches for the long-term, leveraging mechanisms such as training, communities of practice, incubators, and agile methods of concept development and commercialization
Our work often includes workshops – with participants ranging from front-line workers to the Board level – in which we gather input, build consensus, and generate momentum. Throughout, we ensure that innovation is not an end in itself, but rather deeply connected to your business aspirations and cultivated for both near and long-term impact.
FEATURED WORKING PAPER
Through our history of helping organizations large and small tackle their innovation needs, we have identified eight critical steps to bolster a company's innovativeness. This working paper outlines both organizational-level and on-the-ground steps that you can take to be more innovative tomorrow.
Our Approach to Innovation Training
One approach to getting past “innovation theater” and into real results is to have training that roots deep. Innovation has its own set of skills, language, and behaviors, and we are experts at teaching these in ways that stick. Our approach to capability-building is both dynamic and pragmatic: teaching key skills for becoming better at innovation, tying those skills to the methods and processes that teams are already using, and adapting them to the tasks and environments in which teams find themselves.
In our Action Learning Program, participants build skills by working on real innovation projects over approximately 3-4 months. We break down the mystery of innovation into discrete steps, which we demonstrate live and which participants practice on real innovation opportunities between workshops. Participants learn by doing, through activities such as conducting customer research or setting up small-scale business experiments. Throughout the program, we hold bi-weekly coaching sessions to address specific questions. This approach enables teams to have an immediate impact on actual projects, meaning that the learning persists long after our programs conclude.
