Education & Training

Innovation runs on people. The obvious place to start is with training your people, with educating all of your employees in the best experiential entrepreneurial innovation methodologies available, not just for cherry picked favourites or as a reward incentive for the few, if you expect sustained change in your company.

And you don't have to take our word for it. MITSloan Management Review published a research report explaining why learning is central to sustained innovation, emphatically stating:

"Many managers think they can create better products just by improving the development process or adding new tools. But it's skilled people, not processes, that create great products.

So-called “lean” organisations invest heavily and continuously in the skills of product developers, and rather than developing single products, they think in terms of streams of products.

By making people the backbone of the product development system, companies can achieve a triple win: increased innovation, faster time to market, and lower costs."

Real innovation only happens through actions, so this training includes the experiences of going through the real world challenges of bringing a new innovation to market, forcing employees to get outside of the office and their comfort zone, interviewing customers in the real market, discovering that many of their assumptions about their innovation ideas are wrong.

We provide the Masterclasses and experiential programs needed to empower your most important asset - your people - to move beyond the idea stage. We also help you educate your board and get buy-in from your key management stakeholders, and train your own people and certify them as trainers enabling you to own and run your own innovation process.

Methodologies

Because executing your existing business model is not enough to sustain your business in the future, we need new and different methodologies geared towards searching for and testing new business models. We need new methodologies optimised for the unknown, for de-risking high risk ventures and achieving substantial results. And in these rapidly changing times, you need those results much faster than in the past to be able to exploit a competitive advantage.

The Lean Startup methodologies (Business Model Generation, Customer Development, Agile Engineering and Innovation Accounting) offers teachable proven methods to search faster, decrease risk and produce measurable results that matter.

Even the Harvard Business Review already realised "The Lean Startup Changes Everything":

"[...] as its practices spread, they’re turning the conventional wisdom about entrepreneurship on its head. New ventures of all kinds are attempting to improve their chances of success by following its principles of failing fast and continually learning.

And despite the methodology’s name, in the long term some of its biggest payoffs may be gained by the large companies that embrace it."

Now is the time for you to embrace it too.

Programs & Processes

One of the key success factors of large companies is the execution of scalable and repeatable processes. To enable successful continuous innovation in your organisation, you need to stop thinking about innovation as an exception. Innovation happens as a deliberate result of a disciplined process integral to all areas of your organisation, not by accident.

We help you integrate and manage innovation as a scalable and repeatable process - an innovation pipeline - that is capable of delivering measurable results 50x faster than traditional innovation methods, enabling your company to place many more little bets, decrease risk and cost of innovation overall, increase invest and autonomy in each respective venture over time based on real data instead of gut feelings, eliminating risk and increasing investment at each phase, at any given time.

Each phase of the innovation process comes with its own set of programs relevant to the respective stage and modelled from the best examples in the startup and venture capital world, providing a transparent and predictable framework for managers, stakeholders and employees, helping you decide which innovation ventures to kill or extend at every step of the discovery, exploration and validation phase and which at the end to spin in or spin out to exploit.

Innovation Metrics & KPI

Metrics and KPIs are an integral part of what makes a great company operate successfully. However, you cannot apply the metrics and KPIs of business as usual to your new innovation ventures as they are operating with a whole other level of uncertainty, searching for the new business models - not executing the existing one.

Innovation needs radically different ways of measuring performance and readiness than business as usual. The Innovation Readiness Level (IRL) is a new way to help you quantify relative risk based on the Technology Readiness Level (TLR) created and applied by NASA and the US Department of Defence and also used in European organisations like ESA.

The IRL provides you with a data-driven metric to base your investment decisions on and it is adaptable to your company's innovation strategy needs, helping you prioritise for speed and risk.

Management Tools

Successful innovation at scale also requires new digital management tools, because the old ones are geared towards forecasting based on past operational data from your existing business model. As innovation ventures by their very definition is doing something nobody has done before, they do not have any past relevant operational data to forecast on. Instead, we need new management tools that track the verification progress of new business models in a scientific way. Tools that provide real data on how the innovation ventures are actually performing - both today and comparable over time.

We have partnered with Launchpad Central to provide you with some of the best tools of the trade. Based in Silicon Valley, "Glidr" provide a centralised platform for your enterprise innovation portfolio management needs. The software enables teams to track and analyse the evolution of their business model and make data-driven decisions in the search for product-market fit. At the enterprise level, it turns team activity into data that rationalise startup metrics with important business KPIs with easy dashboard views, helping executives and managers compare projects and make more informed decisions about what to move to the next step of the innovation process. Users include Roche, Genentech, Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), and Mayo Clinic as well as over 120 universities (like Stanford, Berkeley, Penn, etc) and startup accelerators (like The National Science Foundation, Dreamit Ventures, Clean Tech Open, etc) worldwide.

Innovation Outposts

Countries in the colonial era launched expeditions into unknown territories in search of new economic advantages. The people who embarked on these journeys were colonists who gave up some of their safe and predictable surroundings in the old world in order to achieve power and autonomy in the new world.

When an innovation venture reaches a certain stage, corporations need to enable the people driving the ventures to embark on their own path to autonomy, and the research shows success is most likely if this takes place at a location outside and removed from daily operations. We call these corporate colonies "Innovation Outposts".

We work with innovation centres and facilities around the world to provide access and closeness to industry clusters in e.g. Germany, BeNeLux, Scandinavia, Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley. We also help companies set up their own Innovation Outpost closer to home.

The Outposts come with a turnkey program and schedule analogous to the best startup accelerators in the venture world, supporting the outpost inhabitants achieving the metrics that matter in a learning startup environment, out of reach from "business as usual".

Human Assets

People are your most valuable asset because innovation and growth depends on people. The number one factor venture capitalists use as their success criteria for investing in a startup is people. Because only people can transform a novel idea into an actual new successful business at scale. And only the right kind of people can transform ideas into successful actions.

And we are not talking about people from outside, but the people you already have on the inside - those who really understand your strengths and weaknesses, those who are already close to your customers and markets.

However, most people working inside a corporation are there because they have self-selected to prefer security and stability - the polar opposites of autonomy and uncertainty - the factors that attract the entrepreneurial types perfect for running innovation ventures. So you need a way for your most entrepreneurial employees to self-select and step forward. Because you cannot just appoint or "promote" people to be leaders of your innovation ventures. You cannot apply arbitrary selection and expect people to be successful.

That is why we provide you with proven programs enabling all of your employees to have an equal chance to participate and self-identify in a safe experimental learning environment with no risk of adverse consequences.

We also know that many corporations sometimes lack certain skills or capabilities internally, that's why we also help augment your innovation ventures by providing expert human assets from the outside to complement you internal ventures if needed.

By bringing in experienced entrepreneurs, providing your ventures with effective and experienced mentors, we also help move your innovation teams further faster, raising the bar in intellectual honesty and expectations towards actual progress.