One way to foster this is for companies to develop the necessary innovation skills among their employees. These skills are fundamentally different from skills typically needed to manage existing businesses. Managing the existing requires execution skillsets that allow projects to be delivered on time and on budget. Whereas inventing the new requires the skills to design new business models, identify risky assumptions or run the right experiments to test new business ideas. It requires individuals that are comfortable with high uncertainty and radical pivots to adapt to the reality of new market insights. 

Building this capability in-house is no small challenge. In order for it to make a real impact in your organization, it needs to scale.

In times of uncertainty, it’s important to invest in our skills

It’s not just companies that benefit from continuously developing their employees and nurturing innovation mindsets. In fact, everyone benefits from upskilling.

Advancements like ChatGPT have shown us the profound impact technologies can have on our careers overnight. On top of this, It is estimated that most people will change jobs 12 times during their lifetime. We don’t just need to find new ways to innovate our businesses but also our role within organizations as well. We need to develop universal and transferable soft skills across industry boundaries. The innovation process taps into critical soft skills such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking.

What will you learn in the master workshops?

Among the many skills required in innovation, there are three learnable ones that are crucial on your journey from big idea to real business: 

1. Business design (different from managing a business)

The ability to shape and constantly adapt value propositions and business models to develop the most promising ones. 

Mastering the Value Proposition Canvas will enable you to design value propositions that customers want and are willing to pay for. You can design a product or service through a customer-centric approach by understanding your customer's jobs, pains, and gains. 

Mastering the Business Model Canvas will enable you to design superior business models that are profitable and scalable. We refer to this as business model innovation, where you are not just competing on product, technology, or price. Rather, think about how to configure the different building blocks of your business model to stay relevant and avoid disruption.

2. Design, test, and learn from business experiments

The ability to break down big ideas into hypotheses you can test in order to reduce the risk of pursuing ideas that won’t work. At the beginning of your innovation process, the risk and uncertainty of your idea are at their highest. Over time, as you design and run more business experiments, you will learn which direction has more evidence that it will turn into a desirable, feasible, and viable business. 

3. Lead and manage

Leading a team from idea to scalable business is one of the most challenging things anyone can do in an organization. Because this business has never been done before, there is no execution roadmap, and everything has to be done from scratch. This is why it's critical to focus the team’s energy on designing and testing and helping the teams to overcome the inevitable blockers they will encounter from trying to innovate within a large corporation. Innovation can not be a one-off. For it to have repeatable results, it needs a portfolio approach with many ideas being designed and tested at the same time. Leaders need to know how to manage, evaluate and invest in a portfolio of innovation ideas.

Learn the tools, processes, and skills needed to build your own innovation capabilities in our upcoming master workshops.