Build your innovation capability

An Innovation Compass course is a good place to start if there is one area you want to strengthen now.

Choose what’s most relevant, then apply the tools and thinking to your work. If you want to build capability across all four areas, Explorer gives you the complete Innovation Compass route and a significant price discount.

Align to Strategy icon

Align to Strategy

Decide where innovation will make the most difference.

Outcome: You’ll find a clearer innovation focus and a stronger strategic case for pursuing an opportunity.

You’ll learn:

  • The difference between proactive innovation and innovation driven by crisis or short-term pressure.
  • How organisational purpose, priorities and strategic goals shape innovation choices.
  • Ways to identify and compare potential areas for innovation.
  • How to express the value at stake and build a more credible case for leadership support.
  • How to secure senior agreement for an innovation project.

You can apply it to a real opportunity, problem or project: clarify why it matters, which priority it serves, what value it could create and who needs to agree the direction.
 
Contact us for more details if you’d like more than one licence for this course.
Build problem solving skills icon

Build Creative Problem Solving Skill

Clarify challenges, explore options, test ideas and move towards implementation.

Outcome: Better-framed challenges, stronger choices and less wasted effort on solutions that haven’t been tested.

You’ll learn:

  • Skills in the three stages of creative problem solving: clarify the challenge; generate and select ideas; plan for implementation.
  • Over 30 tools to navigate the whole process.
  • The importance of going through each stage before investing in a solution.
  • The mindset, skills and tools to be a creative problem solver, and to facilitate groups to do better creative problem-solving.
  • How prototypes, concept tests and experiments reduce uncertainty before full implementation. 
  • The role of leadership in supporting skills building in your team.
  • Create a plan to help you innovate in the workplace.

You can apply it to a challenge in front of you: improve its framing, explore options and decide what should be tested or developed next.

Contact us for more details if you’d like more than one licence for this course.

Create a climate for innovation icon

Create a Climate for Innovation

Strengthen the conditions in which people and ideas thrive.

Outcome: How to create and sustain a healthy work climate for innovation.

You’ll learn:

  • About the climate for innovation in a team you work in now.
  • The nine dimensions that make for a warm climate that helps innovation flourish.
  • Which dimensions are most important to develop in your context.
  • The difference between productive debate and personal conflict.
  • How leadership behaviour affects climate.
  • What improves innovation climate from cases elsewhere and what can undermine the climate for innovation.
  • To create a plan to help your team innovate in the workplace.

Contact us for more details if you’d like more than one licence for this course.

Lead diverse teams icon

Lead Diverse Teams

Use different perspectives and problem-solving styles more effectively.

Outcome: Use different approaches to solving problems as a source of better thinking and improved team-working.

You’ll learn

  • Your preferred problem-solving style with its strengths and blind spots, through the Adaption–Innovation assessment.
  • Understand how styles respond to stress, and how to boost your resilience.
  • Learn how adaptors and innovators can boost collaboration, based on mutual respect.
  • Why some people work within existing structures while others are more inclined to challenge or replace them.
  • How leaders can bring different perspectives into a challenge and bridge the gaps between them.
  • Plan to help your team collaborate better in the workplace.

You can apply it to a real team or stakeholder challenge: understand where differences may be creating value or friction and adjust how people contribute and communicate.

Contact us for more details if you’d like more than one licence for this course.

Every course includes

Questions about the courses

It depends which capabilty you feel needs work. Choose Align to Strategy if you want to ensure innovation projects link to organisational priorities. Choose Build Creative Problem Solving Skills if you want more radical ideas as well as improvements or if ideas in your organisation need more focus, filtering and action. Choose Create a Climate for Innovation if you want the organisation to be more receptive to and supportive of innovation. Choose Leading Diverse Teams if you want to know how to create a team with different thinking styles and ensure they work well together.

Yes. The ordering process is different, however, so contact rachael@bluegreenlearning.com for more details.

No. The courses stand alone and you’ll learn loads just from going through these, completing the reflective exercises and using the tools to apply to your own situation. However, you’ll get the most value from any course if you use a real-life example. 

Individuals can buy any course but they’ll have most impact if you’re working in an organisation so you can apply what you’re learned.