Strategy & Innovation Leadership Development Programs and Workshops.

Create a culture of innovation

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Assess your innovation culture

Define strategies for culture transformation

Drive innovation culture transformation

Do you want to build strategic thinking, innovation, and growth strategy capabilities into your high-potential managers and executive leadership?

Most leaders want business breakthroughs, but many struggle with the elusive and “messy” process required for creating them. Why? Because strategy and innovation in today’s world isn’t formulaic. It requires an agile mindset coupled with rapid learning and iteration. It mandates leaders create a “culture of innovation” that fosters risk-taking and experimentation. That’s how you get breakthrough new strategies, products, services, processes, and business models. And often some of the most important leadership success factors involve how we approach uncertainty, manage ambiguity, and respond to the inevitable positive and negative surprises we experience during the process.

Soren Kaplan founded one of the first strategic innovation consulting firms in the early 2000s. For 20+ years, he has delivered strategic growth, leadership development, and innovation culture change initiatives to some of the world’s most innovative organizations – including Disney, NBCUniversal, Cisco, Colgate-Palmolive, Red Bull, PepsiCo, Hershey’s, AAA Insurance Group, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Visa, Kaiser Permanente, Ascension Health, Medtronic, Philips, American Nurses Association, AARP, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and dozens of others.

Through extensive research and practical application, Soren guides leaders through the steps to go through when leapfrogging to the next big thing. Whether going after new markets or transforming existing ones, Soren delivers the path to effectively leading disruptive innovation and change.

We wrote the book on innovation culture – literally. The Invisible Advantage has been profiled by Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, USA Today, and in other media.

We help our clients build innovation cultures through assessments, consulting engagements, leadership development programs, and by building broad-based employee training programs.

Our Innovation Culture Assessments uncover the deeper barriers and untapped opportunities for driving greater innovation and business growth.

Through customized surveys and in-depth interviews, we create a map of your organization’s culture that creates the basis for action-oriented programs designed to pull the various strategic and tactical levers necessary for shifting culture. These levers include:

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Innovation Intent

A clear, shared purpose that inspires action, aligns teams, and drives an organization to approach opportunities and challenges with creativity and transformative thinking

Leadership

How the organization’s leaders influence strategic direction and day-to-day operations, both through explicit communications and their more subtle behaviors.

Processes

How strategies are executed and how work is accomplished through day-to-day practices and interactions, both internally – and externally-focused. This can be very broad, and includes: the ways the company interacts with its customers/ consumers; the ways various internal functions/departments interact relative to innovation; the ways information is shared; the ways employees contribute new ideas; the ways ideas are prioritized, tested, developed, killed off, and implemented.

Structures

The formal/informal organizing principles and functional designs (both internal and external) that enable (or inhibit) collaboration and guide employee behavior.

People

The skillsets and mindsets of individuals who work together, including employees, external partners and suppliers, etc. This has implications for hiring and training.

Metrics, Incentives, Recognition & Rewards

The formal and informal measures that drive the kinds of innovation-related behaviors an organization wants to see from individuals, teams and departments. An unhealthy tension often exists between longer-term corporate aspirations and short-term metrics.

Enabling Technology

Capabilities and tools (e.g., internet-based collaboration/ communications tools, idea management or idea competition applications, etc.), that allow employees (and external partners and customers) to connect, share knowledge, and innovate.