Workshops

Innovation Leadership
Why is it that some companies seem to have a “knack” for consistently introducing creative products/services? What is different about the beliefs, skills, behaviors and expectations of the leadership of these organizations? Can they be replicated in your organization? In this session we will discover the answers to these questions and others by decoding the innovation "DNA" of the leaders of some of the world’s most innovative companies.

The Strategy of Innovation
In this session we present the key concepts associated with innovation in your products/services and strategic intent. We present the supporting structures and mechanisms that the best innovators adopt in order to visibly and directly connect innovation to the strategy of the organization. The outcome… employees and teams are well set-up to meaningfully deploy the various tools and techniques of creativity and innovation as part of their daily work routine.

Lean Innovation Tools and Techniques
How deep is your organization's knowledge of the core principles associated with creative thinking? How extensive is your company’s idea generation and evaluation tool kit? In this session we present the concepts of the mind's creative immune system, vertical vs. lateral thinking, pattern recognition, the power of previous perceptions, and the Graham-Wallis 5-Step Creative Process. Tools to be explored include idea-mapping, 8R’s, TRIZ, and the morphological matrix.

Lean Product/Process Design Using 3P
Are you ready to advance your improvement efforts past kaizen into the realm of kaikaku, and do it in a way that leverages your organization's newly acquired innovation capabilities? In this session we will explore the secrets of Toyota’s approach to achieving innovative product and process designs that are relatively waste-free from the start. Learn some of the tools and techniques which attack design-related waste and ratchet-up the level of creative thinking that we embed in our products and processes.

Four Fields Mapping
In traditional project planning, the project is scoped out, broken down, chunked up, and then parceled out to those who will be working on the individual tasks. And while this method has its strengths, it also has its weaknesses…typically people and quality. The problem with traditional project planning is that it does not put nearly enough emphasis on who will be doing the work and even less on quality. Four fields mapping is the Toyota technique of project planning using what we might call a cross-functional process map. This simple mapping system helps connect four fields – people – phases – tasks – standards – to create a robust project planning system that cements the cross-functional relationships that are critical to success. In this workshop we will explore the Toyota approach to project planning, look in more detail at the four fields and learn how to draw the four fields map.