Does YOUR organization have the innovation skills it needs to compete?

Creativity and innovation do not come easily.

By their very nature they fly in the face of business-as-usual.

Whether setting the bar in your market, or aspiring to it, your greatest single asset is still your people.

The Innovation Workshop delivers three key outcomes

• Every attendee is transformed into a ‘world-class innovator’… in just 1 day
• Guaranteed to improve your problem solving & meeting productivity by a minimum of 25%
• The most practical & invigorating day of education you have had in 10 years

… building skills that every business values, including:

• Creative problem solving and critical thinking
• How to assemble effective teams
• Agile adaptability
• Self-confidence

The Challenge of Change

Today’s business climate is changing everything, everywhere. Successfully managing an enterprise challenges even the best of business leaders.

A highly motivated team whose assets include world-class creative and critical thinking skills, informed risk taking, seamless teamwork, light-speed communications capability and the ability to react quickly and decisively to any business problem is in essence a team with the perfect mix of street savvy and mental agility.

The Innovation Workshop shows your organization how to think creatively and proactively innovate in order to address the challenges that come from:

• Increasing global competition
• Accelerating rates of change
• Increasing complexity and the inability to predict trends
• An unprecedented focus on quality and customer service
• Dramatic and unknown threats that can completely change the playing field

The Agenda – Take a Day to Innovate

The concepts taught at the Innovation Workshop are practical, easy to understand and apply, energizing and memorable. Workshops are typically one to two days for 12 to 50 people, and everyone can benefit, from C-level executives to brand new employees.

The workshop has four key components:

• Assessing problem solving ‘style’ preferences

• Expanding your problem solving ‘toolkit’

• ‘Instant Challenges’ that require you to ‘think-on-your-feet’

• ‘Live’ references/case studies

Assessing problem solving ‘style’ preferences uses a powerful, proven online tool called VIEW, that helps you better understand your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to being innovative. The workshop also shows you ways to dramatically improve your problem solving/innovation team mix and chemistry… with proven results. Expanding your problem solving ‘toolkit,’ from simple brainstorming, to a suite of 10 ‘powerful’ generating and focusing tools, each using hands-on, contemporary case studies to show how quickly these tools can be applied in your workplace. The class also tackles a number of ‘Instant Challenges,’ short ‘vignette’ problems that require creativity, teamwork, and the ability to ‘think-on-your-feet’… all with important business/life lessons. In addition, the class instructor also shares numerous ‘live’ references/case studies which help reinforce the discussion, and leave everyone with the confidence and practical experience to take what they have learned back to their workplace.

An extended option

• A second day (optional) is used to apply the knowledge and experience you have gained to live/real ‘in-house’ problems, to give you hands-on experience in using the tools, and also show you just how powerful and quickly they can address key issues/needs, even those that have been around for years.

Proven tools and techniques

Using a number of proven tools and techniques, our team will help engage your organization to:

• Better understand how your employees manage change. Each of us approaches a challenge differently. You will learn both your individual and group style preferences when solving problems and how to better leverage success in a team environment.
• Optimize your problem-solving resources and teams by using your personal style preferences in the most effective ways. Everyone can learn how to generate ideas and then focus on solutions that will lead to better products and services.
• Learn and implement several different problem-solving tools that can be used to generate ideas and focus options that will give your organization the right balance of knowledge creation, management, climate, and creativity.

Information Architected teaches corporate Creative Problem Solving in fast-paced and fun workshops. These sessions are held on site at your location, structured as half, one, or two day sessions of 12 to 50 people, incorporating a mix of sound research and practical content.

Every workshop is ‘hands-on’ and ‘minds-on,’ engaging participants in fun and relevant situations that are immediately transferable to the workplace.

Partial list of organizations that have successfully increased their ability to innovate through the Innovation Workshop

• Velcro USA
• Kellogg’s
• Univ of Tennessee Center for Executive Education
• Fish & Richardson
• HR.com
• IBM Canada (Consulting Division)
• FedEx
• Parker Hannifin (Aerospace)
• Performance Coaching
• British Columbia Ministry of Employment & Income Assistance
• Vancouver Coastal Health Authority
• Eastman Chemical
• Buckeye Industries
• Deloitte (Canada)
• General Electric (GE)
• Hewlett-Packard (HP)
• Sun Microsystems
• PepsiCo
• Halliburton (Scotland)
• Time Warner
• Wells Fargo Bank
• Lockheed Martin
• US Navy
• Dialogic
• Oakridge Labs
• Univ of Tennessee School of Business
• Univ of Denver School of Business
• Rice University School of Business
• Methanex
• Colorado Performance Excellence (Baldridge)

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