Many companies find it difficult to unleash the creative talent within their teams. Often this is simply down to the environment. Our hands-on sessions share some immediate tactics to capture the naturally disruptive, innovative capability within your teams.

When we kickoff the innovation day with a 30 minutes session, it’s important that a company executive or innovation leader within the business begins by thanking people for investing their time.

Typically the intro topics include

• Strategic challenges (such as New entrant competitors,Corporate Innovation vs Startups, rapid speed of change),
• Disruption and how to re-invent our own business,
• Innovation Culture, how the company supports innovation today & tomorrow,

It’s common that many people don’t know each other in these sessions, so it’s essential to get everyone talking. A few quick warm exercises get people in the right mindset for the day.

We want you to have a tangible output from the day. A summary of the most innovative ideas will be captures on a structured template. We’ll help you extract a couple of your ideas on the walls & tables to develop further.

Topics that are often included:

• Problem to solve
• Who would be the user and client (often not the same)
• What would be the solution for this problem (product/service)
• How to create & capture value? (Business model)
• Rating: How innovative or disruptive is this concept

A second list of topics helps to aligns this business concept with the bigger goal of the innovation strategy of the company. This list is always tailored to the session (examples):

• What partnership model would be needed?
• How to enhance the customer experience? (customer-centricity)
• What could be a pricing or go-to-market strategy?
• Expected range (high-level) of investment needed?
• Why will this concept win or fail?

Interaction with other participants is crucial. Depending on the size of the total group different pitching formats are possible. Live pitching on stage.  In an ideal setup there are only 5 teams that present 3 min, followed by 2 minutes of Q/A. Longer pitches (or more teams) could make the end of a day very exhausting. When there are +10 teams there are some alternative formats:

• Cluster teams together: Each team “visits” 3 other teams to share their insights
• Informal pitching: open question to the crowd so some voluntary teams present a summary of their idea.
• A facilitator explains the most relevant highlights from different teams. He or she can point to teams to give a little bit more detail when relevant.