50 Activities for Building Innovation (Download)

These 50 exercises are the perfect way to get employees excited about the concept of innovation, develop their innovation skills, build an ongoing capacity for innovation and introduce an easy-to-use innovation process. Participants will learn how to do visioning, seek innovations in a certain industry, feel comfortable challenging the norm, generate a large number of new ideas in a short amount of time – and that’s just the beginning. As they work through the exercises, they’ll have fun, learn to think better and be motivated to apply what they learned back on the job.

If you’re like many leaders today, innovation has become a top priority. The question is: How can you build a culture in your organization that thinks in new ways and creates new products and processes over and over again? With 50 Activities forBuilding Innovation, you have a proven blueprint for creating centers of innovation throughout your organization that do just that.

The 50 fully reproducible exercises are organized into four chapters:

• The Practice of Innovation: Give participants a shot in the arm and elevate their sense of innovation.
• The Innovative Personality and Skill Sets: Build individual, group and organizational skills.
• The Culture of Innovation: Create a culture that produces ongoing innovations.
• The Innovative Process: Encourage innovation using a proven, five-step process.

Also included are questions to ask during each stage of the innovation process, inspirational quotes and sayings you can post and examples of innovation initiatives from the author’s own experience.

You can use these flexible exercises in any order and adapt them to any time frame. With this powerful resource, it’s easy to shake up your next organization-wide innovation training, lunch-and-learn session, problem-solving meeting or team building event – and start building innovation into the DNA of your organization.

Below is a list of the purpose of each activity by part:

PART 1

• First Steps to Innovation
• Productively Using What if?
• Creating Connections
• Levels of Innovation
• Think Outside the Box
• Market Opportunities
• Nourishing Creativity
• Storytelling
• Tolerating Failure
• Visioning
• Green Innovation
• Practical Creative Skills

PART 2

• Building Inquisitiveness
• Building Networks
• Challenging Assumptions
• Changing Thinking Roles
• Changing Roles
• Changing Roles (Forced Associations)
• Test the Customer Experience
• Plan Innovation
• Creative Problem Solving
• Generating More Ideas

PART 3

• Open Source Innovation
• Kill the Idea Killers
• Sources of Innovation
• Real Learning from Failure
• Faces of Innovation
• A System of Innovation
• Indentify Trend, Then Innovate
• Creative Collaboration
• Build an Innovative Culture I
• Build an Innovative Culture II
• Personnel Innvoation Readiness

PART 4

• Learn Acute Observation
• Deep Inquiry
• Marketing Innovation
• Re-engineering Processes
• Formulate Deep Questions
• Deep Empathy
• Using Visuals to Innovate
• Purposeful Brainstorming
• Practice Innovation
• Institute a Critique Process
• Implement Innovation
• Analyze an Innovation
• Organized Brainstorming
• Identifying New Market Space
• Innovating Services
• Methodical Innovation
• SCAMPER Brainstorming