Strategic Innovation

Develop all of the essential skills for planning and executing strategic innovation within your organization – large or small. These skills are guaranteed to increase performance and quality, make your organization a better place to work, and help you become a more successful manager. Learn how to build an innovation community capable of transforming your organisation into a great place to work. This course draws on best practice within world leading organizations to present you with a step by step approach for planning and executing effective change. Class projects will help you practice what you learn. Carefully designed templates will allow you to effortlessly create innovation plans. Course includes access to an extensive library of reading notes, slides, case studies and sample Innovation Plans.

Innovation is an important force in creating and sustaining organizational growth. Effective innovation can mean the difference between leading with a particular product, process, or service and simply following the pack, with the resulting risk of stagnation and decline. Innovation transforms mediocre companies into world leaders and ordinary organizations into stimulating environments for employees. Innovation is the process of making changes to something established by introducing something new; these changes can be either radical or incremental. All organizations need to innovate, whether they are profit or nonprofit. Innovation is as relevant to services in a public hospital as it is for products and processes in a manufacturing company. Innovation takes place throughout an organization, from management boards and individual departments to project teams and individuals. In today’s global economy innovation is often a collaborative activity that takes place across extended organizations and includes suppliers, distributors, and other strategic alliances. Despite its importance, many organizations fail to recognize the need for innovation and to develop skills to innovate on a continuous basis. If an organization is to be sustainable, it must develop its capability to manage its innovation process.

The term innovation is ambiguous to some and often associated with visions of organizations that can create world-beating products that grow to dominate entire sectors of industry. This view is informing and often entertaining, but it also allows many practitioners to shy away from engaging in the concept of innovation, in the knowledge that such visions are rarely realized and often depend on factors such as previous market dominance and chance. This book is about looking into the practical techniques, large and small, practiced every day in leading organizations, that are used to manage innovation. Whereas innovation theory can inform the decisions that must be made by organizations, this book is primarily about the tools and techniques that put structure on the decisions organizations must make for themselves. Although the decisions vary significantly between organizations, the structures around the management of innovation are essentially the same.