5 Best Practices from Successful Innovation Learning Programs

You’ve taken the plunge and begun putting together an innovation training program. Here are five best practices to inspire your efforts.

1. Involve Senior Leaders

Involving senior leaders in any capacity is a signal to participants that the organization is taking their learning and the the topic of innovation seriously. At the very least you get this tremendous benefit, but there’s more.

Do interviews to inform training.

As you begin to design your learning program interviewing executives and other senior leaders can help guide the learning objectives. Innovation might be important to your organization, but what specifically would serve to accelerate progress? Where are the real pain points with regards to innovation? Who is a shining example for senior leaders of the right way to innovate, and what qualities lead to their success?

Include them as coaches.

In an immersive innovation training program, participants engage the innovation process from end-to-end. They begin with exploring challenges, they develop ideas, craft tactics, do field work and build business cases for their innovation projects. Coaching from senior leaders along the way can ground their training, communicate the reality that innovating requires approval and support from senior leaders, and help them to make compelling tie-ins to organizational strategy.

Include them on panels and use them as props.

Coaching participants can be taxing on an executive’s time. Often including them in a panel discussion can suffice. If you have fun senior leaders you can even include them as “actors” or “props.” For example you might kick off an innovation program with a “video from the future” in which the current CEO (as his retired future self) speaks about the dystopian future of the company, and gives the call-to-action to young leaders in the organization to take up the helm and transform their company into a more disruptive organization.

Feel free to be creative, and of course to go with what works best at your organization.

2. Train Groups in Tandem

Progress made in a learning program can be undone almost instantly when a participant returns to the familiar territory of their office, their manager, and their team. Familiar triggers set off familiar behaviors. Old habits are hard to break.

Try to train groups in tandem. Training a group of directors on fostering creativity in their staff, while simultaneously training their constituencies on collaborative problem solving techniques can ensure that learning translates well when participants return to their jobs.

You can also provide training to teams. A team of five or twelve or twenty can enter an innovation training program together and learn new behaviors and attitudes as a group.

If training whole teams is not possible, there are still useful options. You can create “TED Talk” like videos where participants share key takeaways from their training and bring those back to their teams and departments.

3. Define Innovation

Language is the first artifact of a culture of innovation. Having a company-wide definition for innovation is best, but defining innovation simply for the span of a learning program is useful too. A common definition for innovation ensures that people can talk about what is (or isn’t) innovative in the context of your organization, and take action, while minimizing confusion.

The process of defining innovation is a learning experience. While defining innovation a group will have explored what makes something innovative to them, they’ll explore innovation as a process, and discuss the role people play in that process. They’ll talk about the environment within which innovation takes place, and the reasons behind it. In the end, they’ll not only have a working definition for innovation, but they’ll have alignment on why it’s important, and consensus on what good outcomes look like.

Defining innovation is just a first step, and over time a whole language about innovation emerges, unique to your organization.

4. Tie Into Other Initiatives

Take the time to learn about what else is going on inside the organization with regard to innovation and make an effort to tie into those things.

If a new role is created across business units called, “Director of Innovation,” then invite some directors to contribute their thoughts or participate in the training program.

If the organization has an underutilized idea management system, or is launching a new one, expose participants to those systems, and use them in the training program.

Invite the Chief Innovation Officer, or whomever is closest to holding that title, to keynote the learning program or train the new executive group.

If there is a new corporate mission statement with the word “innovation” in it, present it at the training and engage in discussion around it.

5. Give Seed Funding to the Best Ideas

A intense innovation training program may last five days, and engage participants in building business cases for real innovation projects. The inspiration that manifests when winning ideas are granted seed funding for their work is incredible. It’s like being an entrepreneur and having someone invest in your idea. You are suddenly compelled to give that project your all.

Seed funding is also an expression that your organization is taking innovation seriously, and not just paying lip service to a trend. High potential groups that are rewarded for their innovative ideas will stick around and do amazing work, because your organization is disruptive and exciting and offers them a chance to make a massive impact.

Teaching innovation can be challenging, but it can also be riveting and inspiring, and change the culture and potential of an organization. It’s a tremendous and worthy undertaking. We wish you success… and adventure!

Please write to us if you have ideas or questions you’d like us to respond to directly (costa@innovationbound.com), and best of luck innovating!

Follow our company on LinkedIn for the latest Innovation insights: https://linkedin.com/company/innovation-bound

Learn more about our services on our website: https://innovationbound.com