In a hyper-competitive business world where innovation is deemed “a core competency” by nearly 90% of CEOs today, dissatisfaction with this aspect of their organizational performance remains a prevailing challenge and “a major source of dissatisfaction” (McKinsey). This unique short course has been offered to hundreds of executives across the country over the past two decades. Remarkably, at the start not one of them was able to define the true meaning of innovation. Therein lies the crux of the problem – building this capability necessitates a deep understanding of what innovation is and is not. That is the foundation for knowing exactly how to incubate, resource, effectively manage and sustain it.
Organizations that have developed their competitive stamina in a volatile, uncertain and increasingly complex, error-prone world have strengthened their capacity as risk-takers and innovators. While it’s rare to find a leader who doesn’t want his or her organization to be more innovative, very few know how to achieve this vision. Steve Jobs, deemed the icon of intelligent failure, once asserted that “innovation is what distinguishes leaders from followers.” Because they know how to harness, focus and inspire their workers to willingly contribute their ideas and, in so doing, reshape the old-paradigm practices of the enterprise into groundbreaking new deliverables.
A Vancouver-based CFO once lamented in frustration: “Accountants are neither entrepreneurial nor innovative, because we’ve been trained and conditioned to follow a rule book.” The good news is that innovation does follow a set of fundamental rules and essential principles. It’s more about idea selection than idea generation. The riskiest move in business today is to play it safe. Building an adaptive culture of learning and resilience demands discipline, transparency and risk intelligence. With over five decades of researching and teaching the intricacies of ensuring sustainable adaptive capability, the instructor once led a week-long residential training program on the subject at Princeton over the course of several years for one of America’s largest multi-national corporations.
The curriculum for 2025:
❏ Do leaders walk the talk about innovation?
❏ AI, innovation strategy and risk mitigation
❏ The status of innovation capability in Canada
❏ Risk intelligence, analysis, ranking and immunity
❏ Internal impediments to building and nurturing it
❏ Critical myths and realities: Innovation pathogens
❏ Fostering innovation: First principles and rules
❏ Building an innovation culture: Seven objectives
❏ What switches off innovative thinking in teams
❏ The difference between invention and innovation
❏ Conducting innovation vitality and agility audits
❏ The required leader actions that fuel innovation
❏ Understanding and learning from intelligent failure
❏ Borrowing brilliance: How to utilize good advice
❏ Practical, incremental and radical transformation
❏ Strategies and tactics for managing the paradoxes
❏ The innovation process: From origin to execution
❏ Tools: Future forecasting and scenario building
❏ Evaluating ideas and writing winning proposals
❏ The structure and magic of sales and elevator pitches
❏ The critical questions investors want answered
❏ Execution: The hard questions and the secret sauce
❏ The bottom line: How to build, manage and sustain it
The course includes a 46-page pre-course workbook of supplemental readings.