Pain

Our client is a leading provider of multi-cloud services for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control. Like many companies, innovation is a central tenet of their strategic direction.

Growing fast, alignment about the internal innovation process and its steps. No toolkit existed to help managers and employees have more rigor around how to explore and evaluate innovative ideas.

Our client knew this lack of understanding and tools around innovative thinking was contributing to less creative solutions and a loss of new business.

Actions

TrainSmart designed, developed, and virtually delivered a four-session workshop.

Each session ran two to three hours and included the following content:

Preparation

  • Identify four challenges or opportunities that needed focused Innovative thinking
  • All participants in each cohort took a personal Innovative thinking assessment to identify their strengths and blind spots within the four steps of our proprietary model

The Program

  • Assessment feedback allowed individuals to better understand why some steps in the innovation think process were easy and natural while other steps took more focus and were draining
  • Cohort groups toggled back and forth between divergent and convergent thinking during each step…then directly applied the tools and concepts directly to their real-world challenges/opportunities
  • Individuals built skills to clarify, brainstorm, develop high potential ideas into solutions, and plan implementation actions

Results

Program evaluations rated the series of workshops as one of the highest pieces of training the company had received from any vendor.

More importantly, four actionable plans were generated. Two dealt with streamlining a user process – combining steps and programming a seamless “one-touch” experience. Two other solutions came up with ways to revolutionize a process that leap-frogged what competitors were currently offering.

Participants reported:

  • Knowing their strengths and how to add value to innovation efforts more clearly
  • Being able to get the best from themselves and others
  • Understanding how to uncover the root cause behind the presenting pain of an issue
  • Deepening their toolkit for generating new and novel ideas as well knowing how to build out high potential ideas into robust solutions
  • Evaluating the present and future opportunities of a particular solution
  • Identifying the assisters and resistors to implementing a new innovative solution
  • Enabling the company to adjust its innovation mix…accelerating results