You can’t outsource the important things.

After working with more than 100 clients, we have noted one of the most critical factors in the success of an innovation project: if you outsource all of the work on your innovation projects, they will fail.

It doesn’t matter if you use our humble Studio or a 7-figure firm from Palo Alto or London. Many good innovation firms can generate consumer insights and craft a winning portfolio of concepts that have the nature to change your top-line growth. Yet, without training your team on the methods and tools of innovation, the breakthrough thinking will be resisted. The concepts will die on the vine.

Train Your Team

Therefore, you have to train your team to vet new growth without preset filters, especially if this growth is outside of your current business model. Training a core team of innovators at your organization has many benefits. Here are several:

  • Learn the tools that create new value
  • Generate consumer and customer insights
  • Break down silos by having multidisciplinary teams train together

Innovation now demands to be a centerpiece of any professional training and development program. If you aren’t teaching these core practices, your competitors are.

Innovation as Leadership and Professional Development

The primary objective of Leadership and Professional Development is to cultivate emerging leaders who show nascent traits of greatness—and to harness their value they bring to their organizations. Innovation training teaches many of the most valuable skills in an immersive, hands-on, non-theoretical way.

The hard skills include:

  1. learning empathy for potential users of their product or service
  2. a contextual understanding of the market
  3. methods for analyzing primary market research data
  4. tools for reframing business issues
  5. mastering the creation and facilitation of ideation sessions
  6. rapid prototyping
  7. market testing of prototyping
  8. incorporating adaptive market-feedback inspired changes to prototypes quickly and inexpensively, and
  9. practice of narrative-style communication skills that evoke and motivate.

Soft skills include:

  1. expanding mindsets so they look for market potential even if it exists outside of the current business model
  2. rank-less and multi-disciplinary collaboration training
  3. deep listening
  4. respect for others
  5. creative confidence and conviction
  6. an in-depth understanding of the human factors and psychology guiding the invisible forces of the market
  7. adaptive thinking
  8. iterative and non-linear approaches to problem solving
  9. critical thinking
  10. pattern recognition, and
  11. abductive reasoning.

As a veteran of many training programs, I can attest that there is no more engrossing of a leadership development process than attending an innovation bootcamp or workshop. The lessons work upon both the external work processes and relationship skills and internal, personal growth. More important, as you learn by doing, there is a sense of the lesson adding value outside of the sometimes solipsistic category of personal development.

You cannot outsource innovation without missing the most seminal opportunity of a lifetime, including the new value you can create for your organization and the most holistic leadership training on the market.

Did you know that scientific evidence shows your creativity decreases over time

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Michael speaks and publishes frequently on topics of innovation, corporate culture, and sustainable business growth. In addition to being a weekly columnist for INC. Magazine and Innovation Excellence, he is a published author and a co-founder of the Memphis Innovation Bootcamp. After years of advising over 100 companies from mid-size to Fortune 500, Michael has a wealth of learning to offer.

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