A 1-Day Corporate Innovation Workshop

Expert Lessons and Instruction to Surge Company Growth

2X
Revenue Growth

Gartner reports that "Companies pursuing breakthrough ideas are able to generate up to twice the product sales of their peers."

3.3X
Revenue Growth

IBMs Open Innovation Benchmark Report revealed that companies with innovation programs achieved 3.3 times higher revenue growth than those without.

7-12%
Increased Price Premiums

The Business Growth Report found that companies with disciplined innovation programs achieve price premiums 2.9 times more frequently than all others.

Take Control of Your Destiny

Innovation is a risk-reward business growth equation. When successful, pioneering business models and breakthrough products create differentiation, revenue growth, higher margins, and customer loyalty.

It's not easy. But it's also not optional for companies seeking differentiation, revenue growth, higher margins and customer loyalty. Growth and comfort do not coexist.

It's not easy. But this workshop makes it a little easier.

Why This Corporate Innovation Workshop

Any company that ceases to reinvent itself ultimately becomes irrelevant.

Any company that fails to release innovative products gets replaced by competitors that do.

Innovation must evolve from an aspirational goal to a core competency for companies to survive and thrive.

That's why this corporate innovation workshop is essential.

It shows how to surface the most promising ideas. It shows how to convert a novel idea into a unique product, service or experience that creates extraordinary value. That may include new products and services, improved products and services, or new ways for customers to acquire, consume, use, experience or benefit from products or services.

Most of all, it shows how to create competitive differentiation that increases margins, accelerates revenues, and grows companies.

Agenda

Below is our Corporate Innovation Workshop agenda. However, our workshops are flexible, and the agenda may be modified to accommodate the objectives of each client.

As the saying goes, 'Well begun is half done.' That's why we start by sharing the best practices to create an Innovation Strategy. The strategy engineers the types of innovation that will maximize company revenue in the least time, cost and risk. It then sequences them into a balanced portfolio and roadmap that drives predictable and measured execution to a defined destination.
Innovation does not fail for lack of creativity but for lack of rigor in execution. That's why an Innovation Methodology is needed to systemically advance those ideas through a maturation cycle. We review a 5-step framework that harmonizes people, processes, and tools. It applies patterns and lessons proven effective many times over and brings objective measurability to an otherwise difficult to measure undertaking.

We share the most successful ideation methods such as white space mapping, crowd sourcing, open innovation, and design thinking. Techniques such as Design Thinking have become hallmarks among the top innovators because they are extremely fast and effective in surfacing new or upgraded products that will be enthusiastically embraced by customers.

Innovation is a risk-reward equation. In this briefing, we show how innovation portfolio management diversifies and manages risk while positioning the portfolio to maximize financial impact.

Innovation Portfolio Management Growth Share Matrix

The right corporate culture is an innovation superpower. It's also something that many startups do remarkably well. Here we share the cultural values that startups use to out-innovate big companies every time.
The right team structure is needed to achieve lasting results. And the best team structure is a Center of Excellence model. However, building a center of excellence is a journey. So, we share the maturity model that is both a diagnostic tool and roadmap. It shows where you are compared to where you can be, and confirms what steps are required to get to the next level.
Consumer, cloud, social, mobile, and other supporting technologies accelerate ideation concepts and prototypes by an order of magnitude. We show how apps, technologies, and ecosystems such as social media, IoT, blockchain, telemetry, mixed reality, wearables, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics bring far more innovative opportunities to your customers and your company.
Performance Analytics show how innovation concepts, prototypes and programs are continuously measured to show quantifiable progress. They also include things like buyer insights, price elasticity, market supply and other key factors that impact customer acceptance and market adoption. We review performance dashboards, the most important KPIs, and the four types of analytics that bring real-time visibility to progress and predictability to commercial success.

Innovation Dashboard Portfolio Management

What's the Big Idea?

This workshop is an interactive and collaborative experience that uses research, data, and case studies to show what's really possible.

Even better, it shows that innovation can be learned, the cost is in decline and even moderate success can deliver significant business growth.

FAQs

What does successful innovation look like?

Successful innovators achieve 3.3 times higher revenue growth than all others (source: IBM). They achieve price premiums 2.9 times more frequently than all others. And they incur price decreases 2 times less than all others. These are order of magnitude differences that should not go unnoticed.

Companies with mature programs are about twice as likely to convert new products into new revenue streams compared to less mature companies. These more mature companies create new revenue streams equivalent to 21 percent of total revenues. That compares to 11 percent among all others.

Research shows that the top growth companies achieve that growth by investing approximately four times more in transformative innovation than all other companies. By comparison, most companies allocate 90 percent or more of their budget to incremental programs.

How do you innovate your business model?

Your company business model can be modified by adjusting any one of the four company constructs that include customer markets, products and services, value proposition, and profit model.

A business model innovation strategy compares and models these options. It shows how you can adapt, refine, combine or otherwise change one of more of these constructs to achieve market differentiation, competitive advantage and increased value.

Stepping up your business model is often the most important growth strategy for satisfying constituents, including customers, shareholders, stakeholders, employees and the public at large.

The Corporate Innovation Workshop explores each of these options.

There is an additional section dedicated to product innovation.

Does this workshop review financial measures?

Yes. We start with an oft asked question, "how much should the company budget for innovation?" We examine industry benchmarks and how different goals are supported with different budget amounts.

We also show how to allocate that budget among incremental, transformative and disruptive innovation. This is important as each type of investment produces significantly different payback.

We advise how to align your investment with your revenue targets. Successful programs leverage methods and metrics to make results measurable and correlate investment to payback.

We also share the most important financial metrics such as Vitality Index, Research Quotient and ROI.

For example, the vitality index shows new revenues produced from innovation. It brings a degree of predictability to your investment. The Research Quotient helps align your investment with predictable revenue generation.

Does the workshop advise how to mitigate risk?

Yes, the Corporate Innovation Workshop shares a proven risk management method.

We also share real world experiences. For example, most companies manage a portfolio but over-invest in a single concept. They fail to systemically diversify their portfolio pursuant to a strategy. They also fail to objectively measure, rank and reallocate investment from poor concepts to high performers.

Innovation portfolio optimization is the remedy to these challenges and the method to prioritize limited investment toward the biggest payoffs.

A balanced portfolio minimizes risk, allocates resources pursuant to payback, ensures the entire company is pursuing a unified strategy, and maximizes the financial return.

Without a clear strategy supported by a balanced portfolio, budgeting and releases revert to a model based on capacity and not prioritized objectives.

What is an Innovation Strategy?

Contrary to popular opinion, an innovation strategy is not about loosely defined ambitious statements or visionary aspirations. It's about defining how innovation can be used to engineer customer value and company growth. That includes comparing alternatives and prioritizing the options to achieve the goals you find most important.

Starting with strategy may seem like common sense but for business leaders unsure of what a strategy should include, how it should accelerate execution and what measurable benefits it should deliver, it's not as commonplace as you might expect.

The right strategy does five things:

It prioritizes and clarifies the most important growth objectives
It defines the methods, programs or best practices to achieve those objectives in the least time, cost and risk
It shows how to best focus the company's limited resources on the biggest growth opportunities
It creates a roadmap for time-based execution, and
It uses business intelligence or analytics to measure progress and make quick course corrections when needed

It then communicates the goal, identifies the actions to achieve the goal, mobilizes resources to execute the actions, and measures progress in real-time. Specific objectives, prescriptive methods, resource allocation and real-time analytics collectively create more favorable outcomes than would occur otherwise.

Innovation strategies need not be complex. In fact, many times they can be solidified in a one-page document.