Excelling at Innovation

Innovation is more than a good idea. Innovation is a disciplined approach for turning opportunities into valuable outcomes. Embracing the mindset and learning the skills has become a requirement for success in our rapidly changing world. It is not just entrepreneurs, but workers across all industries and occupations have begun to recognize the development of innovation capabilities will help them and their organizations prosper.

The results of numerous studies reinforce these points:

• 79% of leaders in the Boston Consulting Group survey claimed innovation ranked among their top three business initiatives
• 84% of executives say innovation is important to their growth strategy, but only 6% are satisfied with their company's performance. (McKinsey)
• Innovation, analytical thinking, creativity, problem solving and active learning are all top 10 skills in the latest Future of Job’s report (World Economic Forum) highlighting their increased demand between now and 2025.

The course’s 5 on-demand modules (3.5 hours) offer proven practices, stories from visionaries, and examples of trailblazing innovation from around the world. But this is not a passive program. It is a fact, no one learns new skills from just watching videos. The course will challenge your thinking with innovative exercises and out-of-the-box activities. You will be asked to practice new techniques through project-based homework to build your innovation muscles. Upon completion, you will have learned a disciplined approach to uncovering unmet needs, developing and presenting high-potential ideas, and testing them to ensure they provide value to your target customers.

What will you learn?

• How to uncover opportunities worth pursuing. To identify and determine if the opportunity is important or just interesting.
• How to use Design Thinking methods to expand the possible and generate novel ideas. To produce the kinds of ideas that are worth investing your life’s energy in realizing.
• How to ensure your ideas create value right from the start. To use tools like CO-STAR to make innovation inevitable.
• How to present your ideas in way that gets others to say “yes”. To earn the trust and support of the people you will need to ensure success.
• And finally, how to learn quickly and cheaply if your idea is likely to be a winner. To proactively plan and prove the concept.

Who is this course for?

Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to startup a new business, an employee looking to develop a new product, a government worker looking to create new services for citizens, a problem solver looking to implement a novel solution: this course is useful for anyone looking to master the discipline of innovation and apply it to create a better future!