Introduction
While there is no guarantee of success in innovation, by institutionalizing leading and well-designed innovation processes, your team’s odds of producing successful innovations will improve. Teams with exposure to and adoption of tried-and-true training, tools, and techniques operate more effectively and efficiently, which makes it possible for them to innovate rapidly and repeatedly.
Innovation Tools That Reduce Risk:
- Idea generation techniques
- Innovation process design
- Methods for gaining customer and market insights
- Hypothesis creation & testing
- Rapid decision making
NewBoCo’s Innovation program is constantly working to identify the most proven processes to help Eastern Iowa companies thrive. No matter where you are on your innovation journey, you can always learn new methods to improve a process or launch a new product.
Introduction to Innovation Tools and Methods: Putting Ideas Into Action
Time: 8 hours
Innovation is about more than just coming up with ideas and inventing new products. Most organizations don’t have an ideation problem, they have an execution problem. Innovation is about creating a discipline in your organization that is adaptive, responsive, and sustainable.
Learning objectives:
- Analyze and apply trends to your business
- Review and discuss Stage-Gate Innovation Processes
- Applying screening criteria – how do you prioritize your ideas?
- Design for action using Lean Startup
- Design thinking overview where we will create an empathy map
- Participate in a “6 Thinking Hats” structure brainstorm
Customer Discovery – Testing + Validating Assumptions
Time: 4 hours
Any company, regardless of size, faces decisions about their future that will determine their success. This workshop is for anyone looking to learn skills in market research that will increase their effectiveness in implementing innovative practices and rolling out new products that fit market needs. This workshop will help you accelerate the process of exploring a new product or innovation and determining the potential scale of the opportunity while reducing the size of the investment required to determine the viability of the business offering.
Learning objectives:
- How to prioritize customer segments effectively
- Learn some of the fundamental concepts required to uncover target markets and customer segments
- How to craft and test hypotheses to find early adopters
- Explore the diffusion of innovations, early adopter curve, and the best practices for identifying and interviewing prospective customers for a new product or service
- Explore common pitfalls early stage companies experience searching for markets for new products
Innovation Through Games Workshop
Time: 8 hours
Games are an effective way to address problem-identification, problem-solving, and more in the workplace. Groups that engage in serious play at work are more innovative, more collaborative, and more productive. Research shows that we are hard-wired to express ourselves and interact with each other through play. This hands-on class teaches all of the skills needed to implement gaming approaches within your organizations and with your customers or partners.
Learning objectives:
- Learn to plan, play, and post-process games in a variety of scenarios
- Bring a current challenge that you are working through so we can begin to build an action plan that utilizes games
Introduction
Agile is a way of thinking about how we work. It enables people to solve complex and adaptive problems by collaborating to integrate feedback through rapid iteration. Agile addresses the types of problems many organizations struggle to solve today. It can become the foundation of an organizational culture and a strategic differentiator when fully implemented. The combination of Agile and innovation strategy gives teams quick and consistent high-quality product delivery in rapidly changing environments.
What is Agile?
- The ability for a team to experiment in small iterations
- A willingness to fail (and learn from it)
- Self-organizing teams that minimize bureaucracy to be effective
- Visible objectives & transparency
At NewBoCo, we don’t just teach Agile, we’ve built our own organization from the ground up using it. While Agile is most commonly used in software development, we’ve used it as a competitive weapon in hardware, HR, marketing, sales and other non-technical teams.
Introduction to the Agile Mindset
Time: 3 hours
Agile work practices are taking organizations dealing with and within the modern world by storm. While many of these are simple to understand from a theoretical perspective, getting traction and adoption can be challenging. The best place to start is to focus on the why of Agile.
Learning objectives:
- Minimize risk by working in small iterations
- Maximize value by delivering often
- Make work visible for the entire team
- Prioritize work effectively
Embracing Change
Time: 3 hours
“Change is the only constant in life.” – Heraclitus
While this saying was true when Heraclitus wrote it nearly 2,500 years ago, organizations operating in modern times feel the constant pressure of change even more acutely. While technology originally promised easier work and increased leisure time, the reality is that we are now simply expected to provide work faster while managing constantly changing technology and customer expectations.
Learning objectives:
- Planning for change in our work
- Embracing change as a natural part of our work and not an exceptional event
- Communicating the effects of changes to stakeholders
Agile + Scrum Bootcamp
Time: 14 hours (over 2 days)
Our multi-day bootcamps are designed for teams that already understand why they should adopt Agile methods and now want to know how.
In addition to some classroom-style training, our boot camps contain several hours of hands-on activities and labs designed to simulate all the Scrum ceremonies and best practices. Participants will leave this training with a mental toolbox filled with practical experience that will allow them to go back to their teams and immediately start sprinting.
What Our Customers Need and Want
Time: 3 hours
The adage that the customer is always right has some flaws, but there is no question that our customers are the reason why we do the work we do. The need to understand what it is that our customers want from us and the best way for us to provide that to them has created an entirely new category of jobs over the last several decades. Even with trained project managers, product managers, business analysts, and the like, delivering what our customers want in a way that keeps them happy remains a challenge for many organizations.
Learning objectives:
- How we know what our customers actually want
- How we can ensure that what we’re making meets our customers’ expectations
- How do we work with our customers to prioritize our work
Additional Agile Workshops
Planning + Tracking a Sprint
Learn and practice techniques to effectively plan a sprint from managing the backlog to estimating team member capacities to tracking your progress day by day in the sprint.
How to Work with an Agile Team When You Don’t Use Agile Yourself
It is common that Agile teams work with managers and clients who don’t practice Agile. This workshop is designed for people who frequently work with Agile teams but don’t use Agile themselves in order to learn how to better communicate and collaborate with Agile users.
Product Owner Fundamentals
Own your Product Backlog, don’t let it own you! Join us for this engaging, hands-on workshop. We will focus on the most important skills required for a successful Product Owner and practice through hands-on activities, tools, and coaching designed to help your Product Owner skillfully manage your Product Backlog. The role of Product Owner is critical to the success of any Scrum team, unfortunately, the skills required can be challenging and require practice and diligence to master.
Test-Driven Development
This workshop focuses on the practice of continuous testing and iteration, originally created in software development. Building a “testing culture” requires dedication to improvement through testing by building a culture of mentorship, feedback, and support.
Agile for Executives
Organizations that use Agile still have leadership running the company and managing people. This workshop focuses on how executives can implement Agile themselves while balancing their other responsibilities and duties.
Backlog Prioritization
How many number one priorities does your team currently have? Prioritizing work to get the best outcomes for your team or organization is an extremely difficult job. Join us for this engaging, hands-on workshop where we will cover some great prioritization methods to help get your backlog in order and practice through activities.
Introduction
Innovation thrives within a culture that reinforces the right practices, behaviors, and mindset. The most innovative companies focus on culture across all levels of the company, from the boardroom to the individual contributor. A culture that embraces experimentation, moves quickly, and shares lessons learned can inspire high performing teams. To build a culture of innovation, companies must design reward structures, communication structures, support structures and training structures to fully empower their employees.
What are the main factors that impact an innovation culture?
- A culture based on trust instead of fear
- A strategic commitment to innovation
- Shared language for innovation across all levels of the organization
- The space and resources for all employees to engage in collaboration, creativity, and risk-taking
Cultural transformations take time and a lot of work. They do not happen overnight. At NewBoCo, we help companies create learning environments that develop and nurture true innovation leaders at all levels of the organization.
Construct a Culture of Innovation
Time: 8 hours
How we feel while we work is just as important as the work we do. A culture of innovation is generated on multiple levels. This workshop guides you through these levels and provides two frameworks for you to diagnose your current culture, then build an action plan with measurable outcomes to construct or expand your culture of innovation.
Learning objectives:
- Better understand internal communications and make more informed decisions
- Diagnose the current state of your culture
- Design the culture you want to create with an actionable plan
Collective Intelligence Tools: Innovation Behaviors + Mindset
Time: 8 hours
It’s easy to talk about innovation, but harder to model innovative behaviors. Establishing the right behaviors, language and mentality across your teams will help increase accountability and trust across your organization. These tools work on softer skills and require a commitment to personal mastery and reflection from everyone.
Learning objectives:
- Develop a broader understanding of innovative thinking, behaviors, and language
- Apply innovative tools in your everyday thinking
- Learn and practice collective intelligence tools that can be taken back to strengthen your teams
- Understand what makes good ideas succeed
Introduction
Innovation is required for any company that is not on track to meet its business objectives. Many companies declare innovation as a priority, but few go far enough to describe just how innovation will help it achieve its goals. In the absence of a well-defined innovation strategy, corporate innovators are virtually guaranteed to miss their mark, ultimately leaving innovation, itself, as a failed experiment.
The most successful innovation strategies will include:
- Well-understood mission and/or purpose statements
- A well-articulated vision that clearly states what success will look like, and when
- Execution of a sound innovation readiness plan
- A roadmap of expected innovation outcomes
- Investment in new capabilities to unlock new possibilities
Organizations can greatly improve their odds of innovation success by taking the time to define innovation parameters and provide strategic context to their innovation teams. At NewBoCo, we help companies assess and define their current state, craft and articulate their future state visions and create strategic action plans for bridging the gap.
The Case for Innovation
Time: 8 hours
The term “innovation” is too frequently used as a buzzword to describe a set of creative activities that may or may not improve the business. Innovation, however, should be an integral, essential element of business strategy, not an ancillary activity. Despite the unknowns associated with innovation initiatives, top companies view innovation as a strategic element that has a grounded financial justification, clearly defined success measures, regular milestones, and dedicated resources.
Learning objectives:
- Set an innovation strategy that answers the question, “What does my company require from innovation in order to achieve its vision?”
- Set a shared vision for your company, and what considerations are necessary to execute the vision
- Map out and articulate the steps required to move your company from its current state to its desired state
- Create a template for building and presenting the case for innovation within your company, including how to make the financial justification, how to understand the innovation landscape, and how to define the benefits of innovation to the company
Strategic Disruption
Time: 8 hours
Kodak was once a Wall Street darling, raking in more than $10 billion in sales at its peak and with 120,000 employees. The company built the first digital camera prototype, but failed to capitalize on it, and subsequently sold off its patents and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012. The very same month, Facebook plunked down $1 billion for Instagram – and its 13 employees.
What causes companies to fail to keep their dominant marketplace position? What strategies enable disruptors to achieve success? We will explore examples of disruption to glean insights into how we can ensure our companies can leverage change to become stronger and avoid being disrupted.
Learning objectives:
- Understand the distinction between product innovation and business model innovation – and how, together, they can fundamentally disrupt an industry
- Identify disruptive threats to your industry
Establish internal consensus to address a potential threat
- Explore potential business killers to your company
- Develop strategies that allow your company to become the disruptor
Moving From Tactician to Strategist – Webinar
Time: 1 hour
Do you spend the majority of your time at work as a task-oriented tactician or do you think and operate strategically, like leaders do? In this session, learn how to shift your focus from being tactical or reactive to operating with a more strategic mindset.
Learning objectives:
- What it means to be strategic
- How to evaluate time being spent on strategic or tactical activities
- Four questions asked by strategic leaders
- How to create a personal plan to transition from being tactical to being more strategic
Innovation Roadmapping
Time: 8 hours
When an organization commits to innovation, the work has only just begun. No innovation strategy is achievable without a strong strategic plan, as well as the systems required to move ideas from concept to launch. In this session, you’ll learn how to map the elements of your innovation strategies to ensure your organization’s initiatives gain traction.
Learning objectives:
- Play Remember the Future to identify what needs to change to achieve your vision
- Design a roadmap that defines your innovation goals, tactics, and governance system
- Prototype the innovation pipeline required to achieve your vision
- Learn how to balance and diversify your innovation portfolio
