Innovation in Practice

Join Us! How To Ideate Remotely With Your Team

Whether it's a global pandemic or just cutting cost on travel, there are times when you need to work with your team to generate new ideas and possibilities while remote. Join us on March 24 at 12:00pm EST for this one hour webinar on how to use the SIT Method with a virtual team. Your hosts, Drew Boyd and Darla Wilkinson, will share practical tips and techniques on how to make a virtual ideation session a success.

Specifically, participants will learn:

• How to apply the Closed World Principle and Principle of Constraints to their innovation challenge.
• How to select which of the five SIT techniques is best suited for their problem.
• How to create a cross-functional “Innovation Dream Team” for a virtual ideation session.
• How to run a virtual session using one of the SIT techniques.
• Where to find additional resources and apps to be successful in the virtual environment

Sign up now! The first 20 participants will receive a free one year subscription to the webapp: INNOVATE!

To get the most out of this session, a working knowledge of the SIT Method is preferred though not required. You can learn more here. If you do not know about the SIT Method, you’re welcome to listen in and find out if it may be of interest to you.

When: Mar 24, 2020 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: How to Ideate Remotely With Your Team

Register in advance for this webinar:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_OLrYiwaASi6PAL99IKOH_g

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

About the Hosts:
Drew Boyd is a 30-year industry veteran in marketing and innovation. He served as a marketing executive for 17 years at Johnson & Johnson, one of the most admired and innovative companies in the world. As director of Marketing Mastery at J&J, he created and led an internal marketing university that taught executives the skills of innovation, strategy and persuasion. Today, Drew trains, consults, and speaks widely in the fields of innovation, persuasion, and social media. He is an associate professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati and provides training through his company, Innovation on Command. His work has been featured in numerous business publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Industry Week, Psychology Today, and Strategy Business. Drew is also the co-author of the “Inside the Box: A Proven System for Creativity and Breakthrough Results" and is the author of "So You Want to be a Professor: How to Land Your Dream Job in Academia."

Darla Wilkinson is a skilled virtual executive assistant who works with C-suite clients in the fields of marketing, higher level education, and non-profit industries. Along with other clients, she has teamed together with Drew for the last four years. Together they have created a "dream team" approach to working virtually, living firsthand the reality that distance provides a great constraint for creativity and productivity among team members. Darla has experience in various applications, software platforms, and general strategies for promoting efficient relationships in the virtual world of work.

How to Enhance Innovation with Learning and Development Training

by Max Maccarone

Innovation is an inescapable fact of being in business in today’s market. Advancements and developments in technology mean that nearly every industry has been impacted by a variety of innovations within their specific field. If the technology is moving so rapidly, how can you bring your employees up to speed, maximize their innovative potential, and the innovative potential of your organization? That journey begins in the training room.

In findcourses.com’s 2019 L&D report, conversations with practicing L&D professionals revealed that an innovative training strategy translates to innovative business practices. This may appear as commonsensical, but not every business realizes how training can affect their organization’s competitive edge. The report also found direct links between learning and innovation, diversity and inclusion (D&I) training with revenue growth, and an increase in revenues coupled with increasing investment in L&D.  

The report found that companies with growing revenue are 3x more likely to predict an increase in their L&D budget. Using L&D to maximize the innovative potential of your business is no small undertaking, but professionals have identified some key training strategies that can help your business either enhance an already existing culture of innovation, or foster the new culture of innovation your organization needs to move to the top of your industry ladder.

Staying Agile Drives Innovation

For Anthony Sandonato, Vice President of Learning and Development at Wyndham Destinations, agility is the key to success in executing professional development for the organization’s 25,000 employees in over 110 countries. Sandonato finds that an L&D strategy should be, “[…] built upon that flexible framework, and designed to remain nimble and adjust to continuous organizational changes without compromising either the speed or quality of our talent development strategies.” 

But, agility is a two-way street. Employees can be trained on adapting to business needs, but adapting your L&D strategy to their present and future needs will help employees materialize how innovation is, or can become, a regular part of how your company conducts business. Martin Hayter, Global Assurance Learning Leader at Ernst and Young recognizes that, “That personalization can come either from our professionals accessing required content at the right time for them, or from choosing specific content relevant for their role and the clients they’re working on.” Markets and technologies move quickly, and by implementing an agile L&D strategy you can train employees on how to adapt to the fast-changing priorities of your organization and your industry, and implement new innovations on the fly.

Experimentation Requires Recalibration

Delving into innovation will require a degree of experimentation, as you figure out what training strategy shows itself best in your metrics, and has the most positive impact on employee satisfaction and performance. Findcourses.com.uk’s 2019 L&D report reported that 42% of employees valued professional development as their most important employee perk, so making sure you implement the right fit will be an ongoing process.

Take the time to do a post-mortem on your training strategies, evaluate the needs of your organization, and the current trends of your industry to re-strategize how you implement innovation through L&D. Be flexible, but also stay reflexive. The report found that companies with executives highly engaged in L&D were 3x more likely to say their company had a culture of innovation. Recalibrate your L&D strategy with trainee feedback to understand how to implement innovation applicable to them.

Shifting organizational culture from the training room will allow you to build a culture of innovation from the ground up, or transform your existing culture to be more applicable to the needs of your industry. Recognizing that innovation is a learnable skill, not an inherent quality makes training employees into innovation an ongoing organizational process, simultaneously fostering a culture of learning and a culture of innovation. Take the plunge to ensure your organization’s success for the long term. 

Max Maccarone is a content editor for the higher education portal educations.com and professional development search engine findcourses.com. Originally from Canada, Max relocated to Stockholm after graduating from York University in Toronto. An avid traveller, Max is dedicated to creating diverse and engaging learning and development content for a wide-range of publications.

Moms Who Dominate the Closed World Principle

If you’re remotely familiar with “mom life” you know that unpredictable needs arise at a moment’s notice. BuzzFeed recently highlightedthese daily realities by capturing the amazingly creative solutions that moms bring to the table. 

Do you become the human popcorn dispenser when attending the movies with your children? Take your cue from one mom and grab an unused diaper from your bag. You have an instant popcorn cup! Are you concerned about your kids creeping out of bed to get a sneak peek at Santa? One mom fenced them in with her handy electrical tape.

Not only are these solutions both creative and humorous, they are ideal examples of using the Closed World Principle. The Closed World Principle was discovered by a colleague, Dr. Roni Horowitz, and it is a key part of the SIT method. The principle states: “When solving a problem or creating a new solution, one should strive to use only those resources that exist in the product or system itself or in its immediate vicinity.”

When it comes to mom life, the “system” is the set of resources within a mom’s reach during her moment of need. But when it comes to creativity in the workplace, think of the Closed World as a boundary surrounding the product or service. When you recruit resources inside that boundary to generate an idea, the idea tends to be more creative.

It seems counterintuitive. Most people think that you need to get way outside the current domain to be innovative. Traditional creativity and innovation methods use random stimuli to push you outside the Closed World. In reality, they should do the opposite.

Whether you’re looking for a creative solution with kids in tow or sitting around a boardroom table, The Closed World Principle can lead you to think inside the box and find effective, creative solutions.

Click here to read the BuzzFeed article in full.

 

What is a Diaper Worth? An Example of Value and Pricing

When it comes to pricing a product, one principle rises above the rest.  A price is inextricably linked to the value a customer places on that product. If a customer thinks a product is worth the price you’ve set, they will purchase it. And the more they value the product, the higher the price you can set.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal illustrates this dynamic in crystal clear form. A survey of current trends in the diaper industry show that parents are willing to pay a premium price for diapers when a particular diaper brand helps them care better for their baby.

As the article notes, the demand for diapers has declined in recent years as the U.S. birth rate has declined. This trend creates a challenge and an opportunity for diaper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark and Proctor & Gamble Co. It’s significant that both companies have increased their diaper prices successfully without compromising sales of less expensive brands despite this trend. How do they do it? By using innnovation, they provide more value to the parent (customer).

A great example is Kimberly-Clark’s recently released Huggies line, Special Delivery. The diapers are made from plant-based materials and come in sleek black packaging. Some may wonder what parents are willing to pay for a diaper that is gentler to their baby’s skin. The answer: roughly five times the lowest priced diaper on the market!

Additionally, each company continues to roll out various “models” of diapers in both domestic and international markets. This tiered pricing approach not only creates variety for their customers, but it helps the customer see for themselves the value of the product they’re purchasing.

Understanding what a customer values is key to finding the sweet spot when it comes to pricing. Kimberly-Clark and P&G know that parents value the health and comfort of their children, and they’ve capitalized on that knowledge in strategic ways. To read more about this market trend, see the The Wall Street Journal article here.