What if “innovation” was a repeatable business process your employees could do every day?
What if you didn’t have to hire Steve Jobs and create crazy Silicon Valley-style incentive plans and “innovation outposts” to reliably create new products and services that keep pace with the technology and business model disruptions startups take advantage of?
You don’t have to look at those as “what ifs” anymore. We’ve been pioneering the revolution in entrepreneurship and innovation education over the past five years and the best part is we now know we have addressed the key challenges facing large organizations who want to repeatedly and reliably generate business value from innovation.
So what has changed in the past five years? It’s five things.
1. We can teach anybody to be an entrepreneur and innovator
The first change is that we know how to teach anyone to be an innovator and run the search process to look for repeatable and scalable business models. We’ve taught over 1,000 teams in 27 countries around the world. By leveraging online and offline tools that structure the search process. Participants of past programs consist of engineers, marketers, researchers, accountants, social advocates, entry level employees to senior executives, and makers including high schoolers to graduate students. Our core process isn’t just for software. It clearly works across disciplines.
2. “Lean” works across every industry we’ve tried
We now know how to do “lean” across industries. We’ve run these programs for food products, medical devices, super-scalable cloud computing, wearable devices, nanomaterials, Industry 4.0 and just about any core technology and business model innovation that’s out there.
3. The process works for startups, corporations engaging with startups, and pure internal corporate innovation
We have validated that the process works with startups, corporations engaging with startups (classic Open Innovation) and purely internal corporate innovation projects. Through programs like the National Institutes of Health Innovation Corps, Intel Make It Wearable Challenge and with clients including HP, Caterpillar and BOSCH.
4. It works globally across cultures and industries
We know it works globally. We’ve worked with innovators in 27 countries in all different regions of the world including North, Central and South Americas, Western and Eastern Europe, MENA, Central and Eastern Asia, and Africa.
5. It scales to generate “winners”
Including a diverse group of people allows for the entire corporate system to establish a scalable internal innovation process to allow your corporation to meet its future goals – as one solid entity. Of course, not every corporation needs to innovate all of their systems. It is also valuable to run new and traditional processes in parallel. We have seen various methods for a company (small or large) to implement an innovation process that successfully scales their business. But, one thing must happen first – an individual has to learn how to think creatively and critically to accelerate their company towards their common goals.