Innovation Workshop Outline

Workshop Planning

  • Review of company information on innovation, product direction, market, and competitors
  • Interviews with key people (CTO, CEO, COO, key development leaders) to understand current innovation targets, innovation process, successes, failures, concerns, and future needs.
  • Review of external competition and their attack models.
  • Interview with current innovation projects to understand current projects, progress, steps followed, challenges, and alignment with company goals.
  • Baseline current company innovation process, portfolio, innovation aspirations, advantages, & concerns.
  • Identification of participants, workshop goals, and team exercises.

(Note: Actual exercises will be selected and adapted during planning to meet the needs of the company and participants. These will vary.)

Participant Pre-Work (1-3 hours)

  • review primer on lean innovation
  • review a suitable innovation business case example
  • prepare 1-2 innovation ideas of their own to present

Workshop Activities (1 day)

  • Team exercise to identify current & future market dynamics. Group voting to identify top 5 areas.
  • Review of current innovation process & portfolio
  • Team exercise to map innovation portfolio to top 5 targets – identify gaps
  • Team exercise to propose improved innovation process. Group voting to identify 2-3 top change elements.
  • Overview of lean innovation thinking & execution
  • Short team exercises to select 2-4 ideas from those brought by participants for further study.
  • Team exercise to build lean innovation plan for one idea.
  • Presentation of each team’s innovative idea and plan. Group voting to select top 2 proposals.
  • Group exercise to identify next actions to take following the workshop.

Post Workshop

  • Summary report provided outlining activities, discoveries, exercise results, and moving forward recommendations.