Your Design Challenge: Take one cardboard box, a handful of brightly coloured pens, scissors and glue, and turn them into the apartment block of the future.
Do you feel equipped to tackle a challenge like this?
For 120 senior employees of a global property development firm, this is exactly the scenario they faced during a recent NUS-ISS workshop. They began the workshop convinced that this challenge was far beyond their capabilities, yet ended with a room filled with inspired, boundary-breaking design prototypes.
A one day business course that can achieve such transformative outputs is exciting, but can it have lasting impacts?
NUS-ISS’s Extreme Innovator workshop is designed to be far more than just a fun day out. Real innovation challenges are tackled during the course, partly to shatter the myth that innovation is a tool available only to a select few. The course demonstrates that innovation techniques can be incorporated into any business challenge. The NUS-ISS Service Innovation and Design Practice lecturers ensure that participants understand how to take forward their newly acquired skills and actively use them when they return to their day jobs.
Stuart Smith, Chief of NUS-ISS Service Innovation & Design Practice, explains, “At its most effective, ‘innovation’ will be a way of thinking across an entire organisation, from the shop floor to the board room. Containing design thinking or innovative pursuits within a single dedicated department will limit the potential of that organisation to truly seek improved ways of doing things and find game changing opportunities. In this respect, Extreme Innovator helps businesses to encourage staff to see that they have a role to play. We want every participant to leave the course understanding the importance of innovation, and feeling equipped to tackle the design challenges they face in the normal course of their work.”
Through a blended learning approach, Extreme Innovator allows participants to gain tangible innovation and design thinking skills in a very short period of time. Delivered both as public courses or in the form of corporate classes, this one-day programme allows participants to envisage solutions from the user perspective, without losing sight of business constraints.
Stuart Smith explains how the Extreme Innovator course evolved, and what it means for participants back in their day jobs.
“The Extreme Innovator course was developed in response to growing business demands. Forward thinking businesses recognise the value innovation brings, allowing intractable problems to be overcome, and new opportunities to be identified. In the contemporary business environment such capabilities are vital to business success.
“Increasingly business leaders were asking us for an intense, rapid learning experience that would kick start an innovation culture within their organisation. Whilst they might subsequently want to build upon such catalyst training with more depth skills development for key staff, at the outset they told us they wanted something that captures the essence of innovation training, yet is accessible enough to allow them to send large numbers of employees along.
“In other words, our clients set me a design challenge – to take twenty years of innovation knowledge and condense it into one day. I wasn’t convinced it could be done! However, the Extreme Innovator workshop evolved from this challenge and, since launching it earlier in 2014, it has become our most popular innovation training course yet. It seeds a sustainable innovation culture throughout an organisation.”
As the popularity of the public, open access, one day Extreme Innovator course has grown, NUS-ISS has received increasing requests for private corporate Extreme Innovator workshops. Real innovation challenges are tackled during the course, with participants developing solutions with genuine real-world applicability. For the global property developer that recently commissioned an extended two-day version of Extreme Innovator as a senior management retreat, the outputs far exceeded expectations.
Tamsin Greulich-Smith was part of the NUS-ISS team facilitating the workshop.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of delivering an Extreme Innovator workshop is watching the teams bond and work so effectively together. The incredible solutions the groups devised during this dynamic two day programme became stronger in design and more powerful in impact as the participants recognised the individual skills each person brought to the group, and worked out how to use them to their full potential. This left everyone feeling that they had actively contributed, and all equally proud of their outputs. Thanks to the style of training, the skills developed during an Extreme Innovator workshop are not limited solely to the area of innovation, but extend to include interpersonal, communication and leadership development skills as well.”
The key objective of the Extreme Innovator programme for this corporate class was to equip each member of the management team with fundamental innovation skills, enabling them to think ‘outside the box’, and recognise new challenges and opportunities.
Participants commented that the course had taught them that “innovation is relevant, and an important tool for progress”, allowing them to “think out of the box and see things from different angles”. Extreme Innovator is seen as providing a “practical approach to design thinking” that encourages participants to see that “innovation doesn’t stop...it develops, and continues to develop.”
One member of the management team concluded that the course had been “an eye opener that innovation is not that scary and that I can do it too!”
One of the benefits of the corporate classes is that it allows shared learning and understanding across different business functions. A major banking institution also recently completed a corporate Extreme Innovator class. Participants were thrilled with the results.
“The course encourages innovation and thoughts on processes,” says Gregory, who attended the one day workshop. Another participant, Sally, said that the course “is interesting and practical. Facilitators are able to use analogies & examples that apply to real-life scenarios happening in the bank.” Their colleague, Sylvia, added that “at the course, I've picked up tools that I can use to apply to solving issues at work.” demonstrating the practical learning outputs of the workshop.
The Extreme Innovator course is a high energy & fun, one-day workshop which provides participants with an introduction into the key concepts of service innovation & design. Using a familiar innovation framework, the workshop rapidly takes participants through a hands on learning experience that covers the key components of any innovation process such as:
- Understanding user and customer experience
- Idea Generation
- Design & Prototyping
- Delivery of innovation
For more information on the Extreme Innovator course, pls visit
https://www.iss.nus.edu.sg/executive-education/course/detail/wsq-extreme-innovator/digital-innovation-design