Creative Thinking: Ideas that Ignite Your Business

Overview

In order to survive, prosper and profit from today’s highly volatile and competitive business environment, it is vital for organisations to create and innovate to generate new ideas.

This Short Course teaches methods for stimulating creative thinking and provides tools and techniques for generating new ideas. It also provides exercises and tools for you to apply these to your organisation.

It provides examples of successful companies who have achieved outstanding results through creative thinking.

Topics Covered

Building a Culture of Innovation

• Tips and techniques for improving your personal creativity
• Demanding, demonstrating and fostering creativity and innovation
• Forming and motivating creative teams
• Types of creative teams, their composition and structure
• Selecting areas for innovation

Coming Up with New Ideas

• Tools and methods for solving problems, overcoming obstacles and generating new ideas
• Explanations and examples of morphological analysis, mind mapping, psycho-synthesis, brainstorming, force field analysis and other proven techniques of idea generation

Evaluating Ideas

• Stage gate systems and ideas filters
• Putting systems in place
• Establishing centres for idea collection and evaluation

Learning from the Leaders

• Examples from leading innovative companies
• What they have achieved and how they achieved it

Going from ‘Mind’ to ‘Market’

• The process of turning ideas into commercial realities
• How to progress ideas from ‘brainwaves’ to ‘bank accounts’ (including some truly New Zealand examples)

Who should attend

• Anyone who has a desire to develop their own creative thinking abilities
• Owners and/or Managers who wish to establish a culture of creativity innovation in their organisation
• Those who are seeking continuous improvement of their business processes and capabilities to obtain competitive advantage.

Outcomes

• You will have learned techniques and methods to increase and capitalise your personal creativity
• You will have participated in a number of creative thinking exercises applicable to daily activities and to share with colleagues
• You will have an increased understanding of the elements which must be in place for an organisation to innovate successfully and how to dismantle barriers to innovation
• You will have a framework as to how innovation must be managed, how to filter ideas and how to create and manage successful creative teams
• You will have learned how to match ideas with opportunities and the steps which should be taken in order to turn ideas into commercial realities
• You will have a greater general knowledge of how to foster creativity and innovation in your own organisation