Are you comfortable with your plans to achieve top-line growth forecasts in the coming years? Well, no one has a crystal ball to accurately predict swings in the marketplace, but the Business Excellence Consortium can help with the right knowledge and tools to inject innovation into your business plans and improve your ability to reach growth targets.

This two-day workshop is designed to immerse you in the entire innovation lifecycle, from establishing the business imperative of innovation in the 21st century all the way through to marketplace launch. You will experience futures analysis tools to provide a different context for ideation, use some different ideation tools that will stretch your thinking, and examine the hard work that goes into taking an "innovative idea" to market. Topics in innovation management will also be explored such as the impact of culture and organization, and Stage-Gate® and portfolio management processes.

Each topic will include hands-on experiential exercises to enhance the learning process. Be prepared to be engaged and involved during the full two days. For maximum impact, the workshop can be tailored as a custom-designed, on-site program specifically to address your particular customers, capabilities, and opportunities.



Content

• A working definition of innovation
• The business imperative for innovation
• Why possible future scenarios are valuable in the innovation process
• Futures analysis: tools and demonstrations
• Using Creative Problem-Solving tools for ideation
• Utilizing ways to screen, sort, and select ideas for further development
• Innovation execution: from product development to marketplace launch
• Successful management of innovation

Who Should Attend

• Organizational leaders who are accountable for business growth through innovation
• Participants in innovation efforts who want to sharpen their understanding about the entire process
• Anyone who is interested in bringing more innovation into their organization

Upon Completion, you should be able to:

• Explain to your boss why innovation is important for your company to thrive in the 21st century.
• Identify when futures analysis is valuable for your innovation efforts, and explain methods and tools that would be appropriate. Contribute to successful futures analysis sessions.
• Utilize ideation methods to enhance creative problem-solving. Fully participate in these ideation sessions.
• Apply methods to screen, sort, and select innovation concepts; justify further development for those concepts.
• Turn a concept into product specifications and prototypes for evaluation and confirmation.
• Contribute to the successful market launch of your innovation.
• Apply new understanding of innovation management issues to enhance the innovation impact in your company.

About the facilitators
Irene Strohbeen is an innovation and new product management consultant with over 20 years of experience in managing and directing Product and New Business Development at a Fortune 100 consumer products company. Her Innovation/New Business teams created and implemented six new business initiatives, most of which represented new category opportunities for the company. Irene has strong knowledge of product and business development as well as appropriate marketing and market research tools for successful development of a new business opportunity. She is currently an adjunct Assistant Professor for Milwaukee School of Engineering's Rader School of Business, teaching graduate-level New Product Management and Innovation courses to working professionals. Irene holds a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry and Mathematics from Lawrence University.

Amy Oberg is a strategist and futurist who specializes in helping organizations better understand the emerging competitive environment and respond with effective, proactive strategies. With over 30 years of cumulative experience in strategic development and competitive and market analyses, her insights regarding emerging trends, threats and opportunities, future market conditions, systemic and technology disruptions have been sought out by a organizations in a wide variety of industries including aerospace, energy, telecommunications, transportation, consumer goods, retail, bio/pharma, real estate, finance, and national security. She has served as corporate futurist for two of the nation's largest corporations and provided strategic insights to some of the world's largest organizations. She is now Managing Partner of Future-In-Sight, a strategic advisory firm. Ms. Oberg holds a Masters degree in Studies of the Future; a Bachelors degree in Communications; and has completed the Program for Managers at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Management. She is a certified Lean Lead.