The aggressive pace of change, workforce demographics, new technologies, and the like, continues to tug organizations in multiple directions. More than ever, businesses need an extraordinarily strong team of resources, and an equally strong innovative culture to hold all entities together, and to propel operations to new heights.

Participants will become skilled at thinking innovatively, planning for innovation, and implementing innovation processes. Engaging in interactive learning experiences, executives and managers will learn how to lead innovation throughout their enterprises and will return to the workplace with a personal innovation plan for their organizations.

To gain true value from the course, participants should have a minimum of five direct reports. Course attendees will include:

• CEOs, presidents, and other senior-level executives who are ready to step out of the stagnant, non-entrepreneurial ways of acting and thinking that ultimately may stunt their companies’ opportunities.
• Directors, senior managers, and executives from all functional areas.
• Executives who want to strengthen their abilities to think innovatively and to implement innovation in their organizations.
• Managers and executives who want to find ways to think and act with more innovation for successful collaboration.
• Executives with significant corporate management responsibilities—chief operating officers, chief administrative officers, senior vice presidents, general managers, senior human resource officers, and divisional directors or leaders.
• Managers who want to use innovation to increase opportunities for growth and synergize a culture of thinking in their organizations.
• Those responsible for changing a company’s culture.

Participants will identify their critical innovation challenges and discover how to focus on solutions. They will learn why people behave in the habitual ways they do, and learn how to:

• Create superior value innovations.
• Engage energy in the full spectrum.
• Think “kaleidoscopically.”

Executives will gain:

• An enhanced ability to think outside of traditional patterns.
• Certainty around the fundamentals of why people do or do not innovate.
• Clarity about the relationship between innovation and world-class performance.
• Comprehension of how to create super value.
• Increased knowledge about personal barriers to innovation.
• Insight into the relationship between collaboration and innovation.
• Understanding of the value of solution-centered work.

• Challenges to Innovation
• Collaborating for Innovation
• Creating Super Value
• Full-Spectrum Engagement
• Innovation and World-Class Performance
• Innovating From the Middle
• Innovative Action Planning
• Solution-Centered Mindsets

• VP/Manager, Business Development
• Director of Program Control
• Finance Director
• Manager, Mechanical Engineering
• Director of Marketing
• VP/BU Chief Technology Officer
• Supervisor IT Specialist

• Participants will receive two books:

– Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of    America's Greatest Inventor by Michael Gelb and    Sarah Miller Caldicott, a descendant of Thomas    Edison
– Level Three Leadership: Getting Below the Surface    by James G. Clawson.

• Executives will return to the workplace with an actionable 90-day innovation plan and guided planning for back-at-work innovation.

James G. Clawson
Johnson & Higgins Professor of Business Administration, The Darden School, University of Virginia.

Michael Gelb
Internationally renowned author, speaker, and consultant.