• Join Mailing List
• :
• Contact Us
• :
• Customer Login
• :
• Search
• :
• Site Map

At a glance

Innovation & Requirements

Overview

Here’s a course that gives you techniques, tools and strategies to make innovation an integral part of your requirements, development and planning processes.

It is your-and your team's-ability to innovate that is between you and obsolescence or outsourcing. Whatever you are responsible for-business processes, systems, products, services—all need regular injections of innovation if they are to remain relevant to your operations and your customers.

You can learn to innovate. There is no "innovation process", but there are techniques, tools and strategies you can use. You can integrate these tools into your development process to make yourself, and your project team, more creative, and to look at problems in a more productive way. Innovation is not an additional task; it is part of what you do.

We won't claim that we will make you into another Edison. But we do guarantee that you will learn techniques to generate innovative ideas to keep you and your organisation current and relevant.

Here’s a course that gives you techniques, tools and strategies to make innovation an integral part of your requirements, development and planning processes.

It is your-and your team's-ability to innovate that is between you and obsolescence or outsourcing. Whatever you are responsible for-business processes, systems, products, services—all need regular injections of innovation if they are to remain relevant to your operations and your customers.

You can learn to innovate. There is no "innovation process", but there are techniques, tools and strategies you can use. You can integrate these tools into your development process to make yourself, and your project team, more creative, and to look at problems in a more productive way. Innovation is not an additional task; it is part of what you do.

We won't claim that we will make you into another Edison. But we do guarantee that you will learn techniques to generate innovative ideas to keep you and your organisation current and relevant.

Intended For

Product managers, program managers, team leaders, business analysts, business users, product developers . . . in fact, anyone who has a responsibility to ensure that your organisation's systems, products or services are the most up to date and innovative.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Reduce the cost of business processes through innovative use of existing facilities
• Reduce the cost of servicing customers by innovative use of your existing information technology
• Improve customer service by employing some of the Creative Triggers from this course
• Engage more closely with your customers by imaginative rearrangement of your current business connections
• Create improved, more imaginative products by adopting analogous ideas from other domains
• Create an innovative organisation that attracts and keeps the best talent

Content

Getting started

Introducing the idea that anyone can be innovative if they let themselves, and if they have the right techniques and approaches.

Innovation grounding

We set out the fundamentals of innovation, and look forward to some of the techniques you will use. You are introduced to several examples of innovative business practice and draw lessons from them. We also look at how triggers are used to prompt innovation, and how to ensure that the right problem is being solved.

Removing constraints

Constraints are restrictions on the problem space. However, when examined, it often turns out that some constraints can be removed, or changed, with startlingly innovative results. For example, consider the constraint of needing a visa to be stamped in a passport. By removing this constraint, the Australian government came up with the innovation of online application and granting of a virtual visa that shows up on the immigration officer’s computer at the port of entry. We also look at the constraint of control, and how Microsoft, Facebook and others pro?t from giving up the constraint of control

Innovation triggers

These are the kind of things to pay attention to when innovating for new systems and processes. For example Connectivity, keeping your customers connected to your business through an "information umbilical cord"; Participation, how to make your customers involve themselves in your business; Convenience, innovation to make products and services more convenient; being Green, and how this affects your customers' view of your organisation; Giving up Control, a powerful way to capture users and customers; Speed; Trust and more.

Technology brokers & recombination

Being a Technology Broker means collecting processes, ideas and technology that can be brought back to the project and put together in an innovative way to make some new service, product or system. Most of the ingredients are available to you right now, they just need to be seen with an innovative, and accumulative, eye.

Storyboards and scenarios

Storyboards are a creative technique used to explore possible future scenarios. The storyboard illustrates how the eventual user interacts with the system or product. We show you how to use storyboards to derive innovative systems and products.

Other innovation techniques

Having extra creativity tools in your toolbox is never wasted. We look at Combination, the simple idea of combining two things to make something better; Weakness into Strength, to take the weakest part of the process and turn it to an advantage; using Analogies to ?nd an innovation by similarity; looking to Other Domains to ?nd answers; Brainstorming; Incubation; Prototyping and others.

Innovation and your organisation

Here in the ?nal session we relate the course to your own workplace. This is where you learn how to apply these techniques when you are back in your own work environment.

Final workshop

You have free reign to apply any of the innovation skills you have learned to a sizeable problem. This workshop serves to summarise the course and to provide you the opportunity to bring the techniques to life. It also encourages you to consider how to apply these techniques to your own work, and to discuss any remaining issues with your instructors.

Method Used

Beyond brainstorming

These are practical innovation techniques that have been used in many situations to provide new and exciting ways to solve problems. We teach the techniques by explaining them and then having you apply them in workshops to realistic problems. At all stages, you can discuss with your instructor how they can be applied to your own work.

Documentation

Course notes, including guides, templates and checklists. References to Web sites and further reading.