Purposes, Processes and Principles

Regardless of the level of assistance you need, our work is based on a standard set of purposes, processes and principles:

Purposes: Challenge -- Commitment -- Completion

• Challenge -- clearly identify your challenge or objective
• Commitment -- build common commitment to achieving your challenge
• Completion -- help you plan, implement and monitor projects or initiatives

• Convergence -- bring people together to identify their common challenges and create commitment to achieving objectives
• Community -- create a way for people to work together effectively regardless of location or time zones
• Coaching -- continuously monitor progress and help people make course corrections
• Content -- give people the information and tools they need in small, usable segments

Principles: Innovation is an internal, broad-based, collaborative and systematic process of creating new value.

We believe there are some critical principles involved with innovation and these are part of all of our consulting, coaching, training and events:

• Innovation needs to be an internal capability.
  While outside thinkers can help you stimulate ideas and improve implementation, innovation needs to be your competitive advantage, not something you outsource.

Our purpose is to help you develop your internal innovation capabilities, not continue to sell you ours.

• Innovation should be part of everyone's job description.
  Because you never know where a great idea will come from and because it takes collaboration across the organization to implement an idea, it's critical that everyone in the organization understand innovation, be committed to the processes of innovation and have the tools and techniques to implement innovation.

We help you create a system that provides stimulating
information and activities for everyone in your organization.

• Innovation is a team sport.
  Collaborative innovation is far more powerful than individual intelligence or personal invention. As in all systems, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

We help you realize the power of collaborative innovation through building and sustaining powerful innovation communities!

• Innovation is a system of processes.
  You can't do any one thing in order to be innovative. It doesn't do any good to generate more ideas if you can't work together to implement them. And, it doesn't help much if you implement a new idea but it doesn't create value for you or your customers.

We use the Innovation DNA as our constant reminder to look at your entire system of innovation.

• It's important to know where to start.
  If you're already generating lots of ideas but they aren't being implemented and creating value, it doesn't make much sense to teach people how to be more creative.

The Survey of People-Practices in Innovation helps us know where you have the biggest innovation "gaps" and tells both of us where you should start.