What you will learn
Innovation and organic growth isn’t about having great ideas (although you need them). It’s about developing the best ideas into new designs that customers want—yet this is where most companies fail. While most companies demand innovation, they’re just not good at making it happen.
This is where BMGI’s Rapid Innovation Event can help—a structured, end-to-end process for creating new products, processes and business models. First, we help you uncover and properly define the real problem at the heart of your innovation challenge. Then, we help you scope the problem, refine it and design it for implementation—in a fraction of the time it takes most to do this, and with greater confidence of success.
Driving organic growth is one thing. Driving it and realizing it on a large scale and sustainable basis throughout a corporation is quite another.
Greg Frazier - Executive Vice president - Avnet, Inc.
Developed by the authors of The Innovator’s Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth (Wiley), Rapid Innovation Events lead teams through a systematized process known as “D4” (Define-Discover-Develop-Demonstrate). Each step takes concentrated time and involves the intelligent application of techniques to get people thinking outside the bowl, and to interrupt individual and team inertia.
When this onsite event is completed with your team (after six to ten weeks), you’ll be in a position to pilot or prototype your solutions, then implement them to realize your growth objectives. In the process, you’ll have learned how to apply such powerful inertia-shifting techniques as jobs to be done, outcome expectations, innovation financial management, heuristic redefinition, Pugh matrix, design scorecard and many others.
Team leaders (and certain members) who engage in this event will also acquire the knowledge and skills they need to begin running Rapid Innovation Events themselves and spread structured innovation throughout their organizations.
After engaging in this event, participants will:
- Increase the probability that their new products, services, processes and business models will succeed in the marketplace.
- Solve their innovation problems better than competitors.
- Improve the financial return from their innovation investments by increasing the knowledge-to-assumption ratio.
- Become capable of replicating Rapid Innovation events throughout their organizations.
- Possess a clear process for systematically innovating across multiple processes, functions and organizational levels.
How you will learn
Contact us for your customized pricing
This is a unique BMGI offering that occurs at the client location. The minimum session size is six team members, and we can accommodate up to three groups at a time. These team members should be pre-selected like this:
- The team leader typically chooses between 5 and 8 members per Rapid Innovation team.
- At least one-third of the team members should come from the event area as subject matter experts (SMEs). They should be process knowledgeable, creative and respected by peers.
- The other two-thirds should be from outside the process, such as HR, supply chain or technical support.
As with other BMGI courses, needed knowledge and techniques are transferred via interactive lecture, demonstration, individual exercises, process and tool simulations and group exercises. But this course has a single focus on executing real Rapid Innovation projects, so all teaching and facilitation is focused in this regard.
Rapid Innovation Events typically take six to ten weeks to complete. Teams come together with their BMGI master facilitator for three, 3-day sessions during this time frame. When not in session learning how to innovate, teams are verifying assumptions, collecting customer data, conducting benchmarking and competitive analyses, running baseline studies and gaining market insights by applying certain tools. During this in-between time, your BMGI master facilitator is available via phone or email to provide specific guidance and coaching.
There are few hard-fast rules about how a Rapid Innovation Event will progress, but the structured process will take much of the guesswork out of your innovation planning and execution.
Event Length
9 days scheduled in three, 3-day onsite blocks, completed over a duration of 6-10 weeks
Cost
Contact us for your customized pricing.(303) 827-0010
Event Progression
Within the context of BMGI’s D4 innovation model, shown below, the Rapid Innovation Event unfolds in three stages, each spearheaded by a 3-day session facilitated by a master BMGI innovation expert.
Session 1: Define – Opportunity identification (3 days)
During the first session, teams work on clearly identifying the opportunity at hand—working through the job to be done and its associated outcome expectations and value analysis. With this clear definition, teams then proceed to perform any number of actions, either during their sessions with a BMGI master or according to an action plan (tasks and deliverables to be completed between session 1 and 2). The outcomes associated with this session include a project charter, stakeholder analysis and communication plan.
- Define the job to be done
- Create the project charter
- Conduct a stakeholder analysis
- Scope the job to be done
- Create a communication plan
- Perform a functional analysis
- Define customer outcome expectations
- Conduct a trend analysis
- Create a project team room
- Establish a project tracking system
- Begin innovation financial management
Session 2: Discover – Idea generation, prioritization and selection (3 days)
In session two, teams work on generating ideas that will meet and close the gaps on unmet customer expectations (related to the new job to be done). A wide range of techniques and tools are employed to push teams toward “edge of the circle,” innovative ideas—with the goal of understanding how customers try to solve the problems they have, what the market trends are in this regard and what competitors are doing. As the session progresses, and in between sessions 2 and 3, teams will take the hundreds of ideas they’ve generated and begin to whittle them down to those that stand the best chance of success.
- Heuristic redefinition
- Resource identification and utilization
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Generate ideas using:
- Creative challenge
- Forced connections
- SCAMPER
- Imaginary brainstorming
- Random stimulus
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Narrow idea selection using:
- Idea harvesting/treatment
- KJ method
- Pugh matrix
- Strengthen and shape ideas
- Reassess innovation financial management
Session 3: Develop – Solution design and preparation for pilot (3 days)
The last stage of Rapid Innovation Events entails the final selection of ideas for further design, development and implementation (whether the solutions are product, process or business model innovations). This work revolves around creating and evaluating a prototype or pilot of your new solutions. Key activities include establishing data collection and review plans, updating project financials and designing performance metrics and scorecards. The output of stage 3 is a pilot/prototype charter and high-level implementation plan for presentation to leadership for approval. All final design plans will be full working models for piloting/prototyping, implementation, results tracking and sustainability over time.
- Create function structure
- Map new process steps or product structure
- Morphological matrix
- Pugh matrix
- Design FMEA
- Design scorecard
- Create action/communication plan
- Create a product prototype or process pilot plan
- Finalize the design
- Determine the new metrics to track
- Design a control plan
- Reassess innovation financial management
- Plan for sustainability
After the final session, teams will drive their plans forward to test their success, then install them as the new way of doing business.
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Prerequisites
- Recommended but not required: BMGI’s Open Access eLearning modules listed above.
- Recommended but not required: BMGI’s Innovation and Design Tools course.
- A BMGI site assessment or corporate objective to innovate a certain process, product line or business.
Course Length
Cost
Contact us for your customized pricing
Course includes
A copy of The Innovator’s Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth (Wiley), complete with usable Excel templates.
