Course: Innovation for Business Leaders Certificate

This executive programme develops individuals to be Innovation Leaders able to align their innovation portfolios with business strategy to improve performance, accelerate growth and achieve return on investment. 

Innovation becomes a high priority, often as a reaction to a threat or a determination of an organisation’s senior leadership to shift their strategic direction, to drive improvement and growth. Organisations who follow a structured innovation approach have the ability to mobilise innovation initiatives, and can optimise the time taken to create new value for their customers and themselves. In practice, this structured approach rarely occurs as business units and functions tend to focus on serving their own interests that invariably result in manifesting tensions and inherent resistive inertia. So, the question is how do you mobilise innovation successfully in a multi-business organisation? This programme will inform and shape the design parameters for innovation initiatives and ensures alignment with business strategy. 

This course will support individuals in the leadership, management and governance of innovation within their organisations. Through the use of tools and techniques, participants will understand how to build and validate a new business model, improve organisational readiness to support innovation and create a sustainable innovation capability to drive performance excellence. The use of creativity as a catalyst for achieving high performing teams and transformational business processes will be addressed. The course will also examine the use of competitive intelligence in enabling effective decision-making to target opportunities and accelerate business model innovation.

Aim

To enable senior managers to apply innovation more strategically and systematically to improve business performance and ultimately drive growth.

This programme provides exposure to a range of tools, techniques and processes that enable senior managers to deploy and embed innovation in their organisations.

Overview

There are five interconnected pieces that a senior manager will need to embrace in order to lock-in innovation within the organisation to create value and competitive market positioning.

Programme Highlights

Over the two days, the programme will cover:

• Aligning innovation with business strategy 
• Using tools and techniques such as Business Model Canvas, Design Thinking, Value Proposition and Minimum Viable Offer, Value Disciplines, Value Curve Innovation and Blue Ocean Strategy, Empathy Mapping and Customer Journey to develop and assess business case scenarios
• Exploring the impact of markets and industries forces on developing and sustaining innovation
• Developing effective innovation governance
• Identifying and sponsoring innovation projects
• Assessing innovation competencies and ways to develop innovation talent
• Identifying conditions of high performing cultures to facilitate better innovation
• Establishing key performance indicators for your innovation initiatives 

Business Model Innovation (why)

• Assessing the Innovation Index
• Reinventing the business model (the S Curve in different horizons)
• Identifying where innovation could happen (Process, Offering, Finance, Delivery)
• Business Model Canvas (building the business case) and the go-to-market plan

Enablement - tools & processes (how)

• Decision making and visual thinking
• Design thinking and creativity tools for senior managers
• Clustering and prioritising techniques for new propositions

Commitment to an Innovation Culture

• Active innovation leadership (behaviours and attitudes)
• Enabling an intrepraneurial capability
• Creating core competencies around innovation development
• Forming team-X (transformational teams)
• Recognising innovation intrinsically and extrinsically
• Enabling knowledge capture and management

Governance

• Governance structures for innovation investment
• Responsibility and accountability of innovation leadership
• Innovation pipeline management

Propositions & Innovation Portfolio Management

• Developing a balanced portfolio (organic or acquisition) using three horizons in relation to goals
• Assessing and shaping the value (created and captured) in relation to innovation investment
• Understanding certainty, timing and risk in the context of innovation portfolio management
• Understanding the types of innovation to shape the portfolio in relation to strategic importance

Cross-cutting themes

Improvement / Diversification / 

• Blue Ocean strategy to identify areas to improve

Risk

• Defining the appetite for risk

Investment

• The relationship between market share and market growth opportunity versus the innovation investment and risk

Talent

• Spotting and developing innovation talent

Trends

• Horizon scanning and trending - FTE Matrix
• Competitive Intelligence 

Customer

• Listening - customer focused innovation
• Improving the customer journey to identify where innovation opportunities lie and where the customer touch points are

Technology and Partner

• Planning and optimising collaborative engagement for innovation (e.g. capability partner and delivery partner)
• Levering IP and connecting the R&D function