What Is Innovation Training? Innovation training is a program or course that equips learners to understand and leverage innovation theories, frameworks, and techniques. The scope and content of innovation training can vary depending on the institution.
People often have quite many questions around it, and we've noticed that some of those are being asked more frequently than others. Because innovation is such a broad concept that can be approached in different ways, we wanted to share some of those frequently asked questions with you to help you understand it a little bit better.
The world around is changing in a fast pace and the ability to innovate, adopt new innovations and learn how to use them, is inevitable if you want to stay relevant and keep up with those changes. Read more: The Importance of Innovation – What Does it Mean for Businesses and our Society?
What makes it difficult is that for an innovation program to be successful, the organization has to get a lot of things right, while still adapting to their individual circumstances. Here are some of the findings we’ve made based on a number of different studies.
Innovation is a key driver of organizational longevity and growth. By prioritizing innovation, businesses can excel in the market and improve their processes and culture. According to management consulting firm McKinsey, the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has made innovation more important than ever.
By engaging in innovation training, you can help your organization identify the jobs that customers hire its products and services to fulfill. Through interviewing and other methods, you can improve your company’s offerings to better serve users’ needs.
Innovation training is a worthwhile pursuit that can equip your organization to thrive as its industry evolves. While there’s a range of resources you can use to learn about innovation on your own time, many professionals opt for a more structured approach, such as an online course.
In an article for the Harvard Business Review, executives from pharmaceutical and life science company Bayer describe how innovation training and initiatives enabled their organization to transform.
Research by McKinsey indicates that companies adept at five or more “innovation essentials” —such as “aspire,” “discover,” and “mobilize” —experience greater financial returns than less innovative organizations. 4. It Boosts Employee Engagement and Retention.
A key advantage of focusing on customer jobs to be done is that it prepares your organization to capitalize on disruption rather than submit to it.
What makes innovation difficult is the fact that creating something new almost always involves some level of uncertainty. You don't really have any instructions to something no one has ever worked with before, which is why there is no ready manual you can use for innovation.
We like the Merriam-Webster one that refers to innovation as being “the introduction of something new”.
Metrics have a huge impact on behavior, which is why it's important to try to analyze how your KPIs drive your employees' behavior. Innovation metrics are typically divided into two different categories: input metrics and output metrics. In other words; what goes into your innovation process and what comes out of it.
Often, the issue is that companies aren’t used to managing different kinds of innovations, they’re missing some of the critical capabilities required to innovate or they experience cultural challenges. Sometimes, more practical things such as the organization’s structures might work as a blocker to innovation.
You need to make small, continuous improvements to succeed in the long run and often the biggest innovations result from those smaller innovations. Keep creating value for your customers – From organization’s perspective, innovation is just another tool for creating more value for your customers.
Focus on implementing ideas as opposed to just talking about them – Actions speak louder than words and the sooner you're able to start, the quicker you'll start seeing some real results .
To define your company culture, you should start by assessing your current state, establish your vision, and remove any blockers that might be standing in the way of creating an innovative culture. This can be done by establishing new practices and communicating and reinforcing these new values and ways of working.
This is wherein the true essence of innovation lies: Nurturing creativity in those around you, and letting it bloom without restraint. Now, talking about it and actually doing it are two very different things.
Communicating Through Questions. To promote effective thinking, there might a clever way to spark creativity through seemingly standard communication. The trick is not to automatically provide answers to every baffling problem, even despite potentially having clever solutions to them yourself. By conversing through questions, for example: “What do ...
Making questions a part of your daily routine in communication, be it with peers or employees, requires four things on your part: Believe in your peers. Don't be afraid to give others responsibility and pick their brain every once in a while.
This mindset is vital in terms of not being absolute in your own ideas and opinions . It also enables this kind of behavior in others which, especially on a long-term scale, has a positive effect on the organization.
Being critical of your own opinions is just as important as being critical of the opinions of others. Think about what you might ask, beforehand. It might well be worth it to invest a few minutes to think about your conversations beforehand, instead of improvising.