In-house training
Innovation Training
A new idea is rarely lost for lack of talent: it is lost because nobody noticed it, defended it or helped it grow.
This two-day innovation training is designed for business professionals, managers, project leaders, heads of department and directors who want to bring out and carry forward the proposals of their teams. Unlike online programs or the short courses offered by business schools and other innovation courses, it is run in-house, on your own business topics, with a strong focus on practical exercises. It will help your managers build the habits that let employees propose, test and learn, and help the organization turn proposals into results. It gives a practical method, the three universal steps of innovation according to the DOJI approach, and above all develops the mindset and soft skills that decide the fate of an idea: listening, questioning, feedback, handling resistance. It is part of our approach to managing innovation and the transformation of organizations, and supports your business strategy and growth.
Why this training
Benefits for participants
Spot and protect emerging proposals instead of judging them too early
Adopt a style of leading people that makes them want to propose
Lead an idea all the way to its proof of concept
5 modules
Innovation Training Program in Detail
- Innovation or improvement: a difference in kind, not in degree
- An innovation is an invention that has spread within its community. Improvement reassures, innovation disturbs: understanding this difference explains most of the resistance met in organizations, and helps you innovate without putting people off. Digital technologies and new frameworks have accelerated invention, but they have not changed this human side of innovation.
- Key observation, key idea, key object: the common core of all innovations
- Whatever the field, technology, business, science or art, every successful innovation goes through these three milestones, in this order. The key observation is a singular detail that most people overlook; the key idea attaches itself to it and gives it value; the key object proves that the idea can be made real.
- The three tensions to work through
- Each step requires holding two contradictory demands together, such as an obsession with a goal and curiosity for what seems unimportant; no amount of technical knowledge or digital tools can replace that balance. Learning to recognise them in yourself and in your team will change the way you support people over the long term.
- Running creativity and design thinking workshops
- Separate the moment for imagining from the moment for judging, enforce the rules of brainstorming, give a voice to quieter people through brainwriting: practical creativity tools at the service of teams. Participants run short workshops themselves, help each other and learn from the debrief, building confidence session after session.
- Choosing your methods: ideation, design thinking or Creative Problem Solving
- Design thinking to understand a customer need, CPS to quickly unblock a specific problem: what each of these frameworks brings, and what it does not. Participants learn to choose the right tool for each business situation, from a product improvement to a disruptive offer.
- Training your eye: looking for the detail others overlook
- Creativity can be developed, like listening or public speaking: each participant leaves with their own exercises and the best practices of the group.
- Listen before answering, ask before evaluating
- The soft skills that decide the fate of a proposal: active listening, open questions, rephrasing, the ability to suspend judgement. These are leadership skills in the full sense, and they can be learned.
- Building psychological safety at work: what helps people speak up
- What makes an employee dare to say they have seen something strange, or that they got it wrong. Feedback that encourages without flattering: an everyday habit of the best managers. Amy Edmondson, at Harvard Business School, has shown how much team learning depends on it.
- Handling resistance to change
- A genuinely new idea first meets rejection. Understanding this reflex, in others as in yourself, and learning to respond without losing heart, at every stage of the transformation. Change takes time, and the manager sets its pace.
- Building a complementary team
- The sieve trap: each step of innovation selects different qualities, which one person rarely combines. The three archetypes of the Hunter, the Mage and the Grower help you build a group that covers them all, and recognise your own strengths. Knowledge of these profiles helps executive teams staff innovation projects with the best mix of people.
- Defending an idea before an executive committee, and knowing when to stop
- Presenting a project in the language of strategy and of the business case: value for the customer, risk, resources, next decision point. Many good ideas die because they are presented as new technologies rather than as business opportunities for the company.
- Managing innovation day to day: decision criteria, prototype, proof of concept
- The decision process, the innovation portfolio and the performance of an innovation approach, seen from the manager's role. Long-term growth depends on these strategic choices as much as on new technologies.
- Observation grid for the role plays, completed by the observers
- Group debrief after each exercise, on the methods and on the stance of the manager
- Individual action plan, written at the end of the second day on a real project to move forward
- This program can be adapted to the specific needs of each organization: its duration, its examples and its exercises, including digital innovation topics.
Role plays
Case studies used in the course
Four historical cases analysed with the DOJI framework, followed by two role plays based on your own topics, from a product improvement to a disruptive project.
The bagless vacuum cleaner
how James Dyson noticed, while vacuuming at home, the detail that a whole industry had ignored.
Grameen Bank
Muhammad Yunus's observation in Bangladesh and the idea, judged absurd by the banks, of lending to the poorest.
Penicillin
the mould Alexander Fleming could have thrown away, and the years it took to turn it into a medicine.
Amazon.com
the internet growth figure that convinced Jeff Bezos to leave his job and sell books online.
The committee that says no
a manager defends an emerging idea before a sceptical director.
The disruptive idea
an employee proposes an option that challenges the way work is organized: how to receive it.
FAQ
Very practical know-how for professionals: spotting promising ideas, bringing them out in teams and leading them to a first proof of concept. The method builds on the three universal steps of innovation of the DOJI approach: key observation, key idea, key object.
Half of the two days is spent on the stance of the manager and on leadership behaviours: listening without judging too quickly, asking questions, giving feedback, handling resistance. That is where, day after day, the fate of every new proposal is decided.
DOJI is a cross-disciplinary approach, built from the analysis of many historical cases in technology, business, science and art. It shows that every innovation goes through three milestones in the same order: a key observation, often a detail that everyone overlooks, a key idea that attaches itself to it, then a key object that proves the idea can be made real.
For a manager, its value is very concrete: it says what to look for at each step, which qualities each step requires and why a complementary team succeeds where one person alone fails.
Because a genuinely new idea first meets rejection, including from those who should support it. The line manager is the first filter: depending on how they listen and respond, the idea moves up or disappears. Innovating therefore requires as many human qualities as methods.
The soft skills practised during the two days, active listening, questioning, feedback, handling resistance, are useful far beyond innovation: they strengthen the culture of the whole team and the engagement of employees.
The reference format lasts two days. We also offer a one-day workshop focused on creativity and listening, and a one- to two-day seminar for a chief executive and their executive committee who want to define their innovation approach and its rules of the game.
All our programs are run in-house, in English, French or Russian, at your premises or at an outside venue. Each format is built with you, according to your organization, your tools and your strategy, and we design the content so that it fits with your other programs for managers and professionals. This is not one of the many online programs: the role plays need people in the same room.
The price is €2,500 excluding VAT per day, i.e. €5,000 for the two-day format, for up to 24 people. The course does not lead to a certification.
The two days give knowledge, methods and reflexes. To anchor them, the course can be followed by coaching for the managers who lead the most exposed projects, or by support for senior management on building an innovation culture and developing its processes. The trainer remains available after the session to help you take stock, so that employees and managers keep their commitments over the long term.
In-house training
€5,000excl. VAT
2 days · up to 24 participants
- Course duration: 2 days, a duration that leaves room for practical exercises
- Format: in person (Europe, location to be agreed), at your premises, in a seminar centre or at an outside venue, in Paris, Lyon or Geneva
- Trainer: Marc Prager, ICF certified coach (PCC), former senior manager at Xerox, Groupe SEB and Lactalis
- Learning materials given to each participant, including the DOJI frameworks; detailed program sent before the session
- Languages: English, Russian, French
- Other formats: a one-day workshop focused on creativity and listening, or a one- to two-day seminar for an executive committee that wants to define its innovation approach and strategic priorities
- Quality assessment: participants' feedback collected at the end of the course, then their manager's feedback a few weeks after the session, to measure the transfer of learning
- Six role plays and case studies, each followed by a debrief
- Design of our programs, like all our courses: the content and duration are adjusted to your organization, your culture and your strategy after a first conversation
- No prerequisites. Experience of leading people or projects is recommended; the course suits people from every business function
- No certification
- In-house only
Our other training courses
This article was written by Marc Prager.