Getting Started With Innovation

People just getting started with innovation often feel overwhelmed by an avalanche of information on tools, processes, systems, and options as they seek to decide strategy and program. This half-day pre-conference workshop will give you a solid grounding in innovation fundamentals, and will highlight the tasks that leaders of Innovation must do. This grounding will help make the rest of the conference even more valuable.

• Learn the pitfalls to innovation, and how to avoid them.
• Learn your own individual creativity style, and how to use it to improve organizational innovation.
• Learn the process elements for innovative problem solving.
• Practice using several tools for "thinking out of the box."
• Learn the four areas that true leaders of innovation must master, with emphasis on creating a self-sustaining environment.

Charles W. Prather is former Manager of the DuPont Center for Creativity & Innovation and he is now President of Bottom Line Innovation Associates, Inc., helping organizations build their internal competency at Innovation. He is a Senior Fellow at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at The University of Maryland, College Park, and guest lecturer at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Business. Charlie is a frequent keynote speaker and conference presenter, has authored numerous magazine articles, and his book, "Blueprints for Innovation," was published by the American Management Association. Charlie earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from N.C. State University, and served Dupont for some 96 quarters in numerous R&D Management positions. He is bilingual in both English and Southern.

Charles Prather
President
Bottom Line Innovation Associates, Inc.

The Innovation CUBE:
How to Turn Great Ideas into Business Solutions

The Innovation CUBE replicates the dynamics of innovation. It takes the "mystery" out of innovation to make it understandable, practical and doable by any project team. Companies such as General Electric, Motorola, General Dynamics, Masco, Weyerhaeuser, and many others are using the CUBE to develop breakthrough products, processes and business systems.

This "hands on" workshop will show you how to:
• Make innovative thinking part of any project, product, service, or business system
• Link innovation to existing initiatives such as Six Sigma, Lean, Quality Function Deployment, Portfolio Planning, and Effective Project Management
• Find new break away opportunities before your competition even wakes up
• Solve the Universal Value Equation that customers crave
• Generate ten times your usual number of practical ideas
• Measure solutions against one another to make sure you have the right feedback to make the right decision
• Create your own innovation data bank to store ideas for future use
• Develop a corporate-wide innovation improvement effort

Participants Will Take Away:
• A demo copy of the new Excel-based Innovation Cube for their personal use
• A signed copy of Bart Huthwaite's latest book, "The Innovation CUBE: How To Turn Great Ideas into Business Solutions"
• An innovative "pop up" cardboard Cube as a handy reference tool

Bart Huthwaite
Sr. Founder
Institute for Lean Innovation

Lunch 12:00 PM – 1:00PM

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Inspiring Innovation Through Team Ethnography

When a diverse team (product development, marketing, consumer insights) goes out together into the customer's real world, what they see and hear acts as a powerful springboard and catalyst for their own creative thinking and dialogue. Innovation – both the insights and the commitment necessary to implement them – comes from this team-based approach. Customer understanding is everyone's business.

Participants in this workshop will be introduced to team ethnography, a process that transforms a "tool" into an impactful organizational learning experience. The approach, developed over thirty years, helps teams take a doit-yourself approach to ethnography that delivers on the promise of "seeing the world with new eyes."

In this experiential workshop, we will focus on the three critical stages of team ethnography:

1. The Get Ready Work
2. The Fieldwork Experience
3. Meaning Making – the Now What?

Working in teams, focused on specific assignments, we will begin at the hotel, go to a location for fieldwork, and return to the hotel to explore both what was learned and how to facilitate a team's ability to build actionable insights from ethnographic data.

The workshop will be led by Barbara Perry, PhD, a cultural anthropologist who pioneered the use of team ethnography in business settings.

Barbara Perry, PhD, is founder and president of Barbara Perry Associates. Dr. Perry brings a cultural anthropologist's perspective to her work with organizations. In her 30 years of consulting to Fortune 500 companies across a broad variety of products and services, her focus has been on supporting their effectiveness as a team to not only see new opportunities but be able to realize them.

She pioneered the use of ethnographic methods to get closer to the consumer. Her emphasis is on developing internal, cross-functional capability to go out into their customer's environment and see with new eyes the underlying values and assumptions that give meaning to their experience and drive their behavior. Her proprietary methodology has been applied in a variety of ways including: product development, market development, brand and communication strategy, and culture change.

Barbara Perry, PhD
Founder and President
Barbara Perry Associates