Most of our events and innovation workshops are private at the site of our client organization. On occasion there are design thinking training workshops, events, special programs or courses open to the public. Below are some design thinking and innovation events you can participate in or bring to your organization or association. Contact us for questions or more details about an innovation event.
Available Courses or Innovation Events
(We’ve even brought all of these full day events/courses to organizations like Canon and the University of Wisconsin as a larger innovation learning program.)
I. Harness the Power of Design Thinking: Fostering a Culture of Innovation
II. Design Thinking in your Organization: Organizational Innovation Practices
III. How to Innovate Swiftly and Systematically with Teams: Innovation Step-by-Step
IV. Leading Innovation: Mindset, Skills, Action, & Renewal
Description of Innovation Events and Courses
Innovation Event One Day Course Workshops
I. Harness the Power of Design Thinking: Fostering a Culture of Innovation
Are you looking for an innovation wake-up call, for your team or organization? Have you been so focused on results that you struggle to find the next big idea? Do you want to inspire your teams to design for what your customer really wants?
In this one-day Innovation event, you’ll be an active part of a design thinking process. Through individual and small group activities, you’ll experience a step-by-step process for identifying and acting on new innovation opportunities and thinking in new ways to capture that potential.
In this highly interactive and collaborative day you’ll experience engaging and effective activities firsthand (and leave with a guide & tutorials to engage your organization). Experience activities that are at the center of customer-focused Agile approaches to innovation. Within this workshop, you’ll be part of activities including:
- Stanford D School Design Thinking Process: Emphasize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test
- IDEO’s Human Centered Design: Hear, Create, Deliver
- Innovation Step by Step – 3 stages and 7 steps
- Challenge: Clarify the innovative design challenge with focused questions for your users/customers
- Ideas: Generate many ideas to analyze and synthesize for your innovative design with your users/customers
- Action: Conceptualize, Validate, Communicate, and Launch your innovation with your users/customers
- Rapid interviews
- Value Proposition Concept Sheets
- Meaning Diverging and Converging
- Customer Persona Making
- Customer Journey Mapping
- Rapid & Rough Prototyping
- Customer Validator
- Shark Tank
II. Design Thinking in your Organization: Organizational Innovation Practices
This course focuses on the organization in terms of innovation. What can everyone do to contribute to a culture of innovation…either as a collection of individuals or in different dynamics. Collaborate, communicate, and create innovation within your organization; engage and motivate others in an organizational culture of innovation that is sustainable. Learn how to catalyze learning and develop motivators to innovative action in the organization. Develop the skills, mindset, processes, and action to launch focused innovation within your organization.
This workshop will be highly collaborative and interactive. As part of a community of innovation learners and leaders we will engage in a culture of innovation together. You will get to meet many different participants and work on activities with them during the day.
Learning Objectives:
- Design new programs or initiatives for your organization
- Recruit and enhance employee engagement and experience in innovation
- Catalyze a “culture of innovation” in a small group, working toward big change
- Learn how to recognize and leverage champions of change in your organization
- Foster faster learning and experimentation in your organization
After the Workshop: Access to materials, practices and online seminars to apply the programs, activities, and initiatives that can drive a culture of innovation in your organization.
III. How to Innovate Swiftly and Systematically with Teams: Innovation Step-by-Step
This course focuses on the group or team element in organizations, and how you can lead and facilitate them through the innovation process. We will show you a design sprint style that blends design thinking and agile to help your teams advance. Innovate how you create and develop ideas to foster more innovation in your work with the teams you are already a part of or assemble. Acquire and customize a toolkit of activities and a system for the “fuzzy front end of innovation.” In this fast paced, reflective, interactive, and engaging program, you will experience activities and a system for idea development firsthand. Get motivated to innovate by addressing your opportunities with applied systematic creativity using the “Innovation Step-by-Step” process. Follow along with your own challenge to develop new products, services, or organization enhancements. Use the system and activities with your own group after you learn it and get practice facilitating simple innovation activities with a group at our course.
This workshop will be highly interactive and collaborative. You will get to meet many different participants and work on activities with them during the day.
Learning Objectives:
- Get familiar with the innovation step-by-step system through a demonstration.
- ID a relevant challenge to follow the steps with and create ideas for.
- Start to develop a relationship as a 5 person team.
- Learn collaborative tools and techniques for innovation and ideation.
- Learn how to train others in tools, techniques, and methods to facilitate innovation and design thinking
Doing the steps of the Innovation Step-by-Step seven-step process
- Clarify the Innovation Challenge
- Focus with Specific Questions
- Generate Ideas
- Analyze & Synthesize Ideas
- Develop Concepts
- Test & Select Concepts
- Communicate & Advance
After the Workshop: Access to online tutorials, guides, and workshops to keep using the innovation step-by-step methods, frameworks, and tools for the process you lead with your teams.
IV. Leading Innovation: Mindset, Skills, Action, & Renewal
Innovation skills are an important skill set to cultivate as a professional in an organization or as an entrepreneur. How have you learned innovation and are leading it? How can you keep learning and developing your innovation skills…and help others to do so in a disruptive world of change? How can you stay on the cutting edge and in innovative action? How can you lead with others to innovate and respond to change?
This workshop focuses on the individual…you as innovator and leader. We want to grow to new levels. To reorganize yourself at a new and higher level requires innovation…doing something new that you’ve never done before in a way you’ve never done it. Since it’s new and different for you, you have to learn how to do it and develop your skill at it…including leading innovation in yourself and others. This ability to innovate begins with a change in mindset…to have the self-efficacy and confidence that you can try new and different things in your work and life, and that you can learn how to do them even if you don’t know now.
Learning Objectives:
- Reorganize yourself at a higher level through innovation…take action to learn and do something new and different that has a positive impact for you and others.
- Get into action doing many small, new and different innovative things but also occasionally some big breakthrough ones that you strategically plan by innovating step-by-step.
- Do the things you should do that you may not have done. Catch up. Leverage the most important source of new and better ideas…applying technology. Adopt technology at a faster rate.
- See that you have a story and history as an innovator (someone who has learned and done new and different things for higher levels of growth and impact). Strategize to do more of them and continue your timeline.
- Move from less of a fixed mindset to more of a growth mindset and help others as a leader to do so as well.
Individual techniques and tools for leading innovation: Break out of ruts, generate more ideas, or think in new directions with ideation tools and techniques for individual innovators.
After the Workshop: Access to online tutorials, guides, and workshops to keep using the methods, frameworks, and tools in your career.
Innovation Events – About your teacher & facilitator for each course:
Darin Eich, Ph.D. is a UW-Madison alum and the author of Innovation Step-by-Step: How to Create & Develop Ideas for your Challenge as well as Root Down & Branch Out: Best Practices for Leadership Development Programs. He is a widely sought after innovation training workshop designer and keynote speaker as the founder of Innovation Learning. Darin is known for making design thinking and innovation fun, simple, and contagious to pass on in within organizations. Over the past decade, Darin has helped over 100 organizations from Silicon Valley to Singapore with innovation and leadership development. Darin designs highly engaging programs used by over 1 million people that have been featured in USA TODAY & US NEWS and offered dozens of times by the University of Wisconsin and Dartmouth College. He launched his innovation consulting career as the president of BrainReactions where he led design thinking and ideation projects for clients like P&G, Kellogg, Agilent, Black & Decker, BMW, & the United Nations.