Creative Innovation in a Lean Environment
Free up the resources you need to focus on innovation
1-Day Program
About the Program
This interactive one-day Leadership Program focuses on leading and supporting product and service innovation, while recognizing the challenges faced in today's business environment.
How do we eliminate the non-value-added components of our business, and free up the resources we need to focus on innovation? Lean also instills a culture we can use as a foundation for innovation in our business.
Published surveys of leadership sentiments agree:
- Most businesses are too complex.
- Customers don't understand or value all the offerings of these same services.
- The most significant obstacles to innovation are a lack of resources and short-term focus.
Challenges create opportunities, and this is where "Lean" comes in. Often thought of as a cost-cutting tool or headcount reduction tactic, lean focuses on value.
Who should attend
This program is intended for Managers and Executives charged or concerned with fostering innovation and creativity in their environment.
Lean Innovation - Understanding What's Next in Today's Economy
In Lean Innovation: Understanding What's Next in Today's Economy, Barry Cross explores how to use Lean to free up resources from within the organization to support and ‘fund’ innovation and inspire a culture of creativity. Easy to read and humorous, Cross’ stories resonate and his tactics are very applicable. He demonstrates that you likely have the people needed to drive innovation.
Organizational benefits
- Continuous and sustained fresh thinking
- Best-in-class employee enthusiasm and morale
- Improvement to existing processes
- An agile culture that supports the next thing, while recognizing legacy products and services we should move past
Personal benefits
- Enable your teams to better identify opportunity
- Learn to recognize waste and how it inhibits the delivery of value to customers
- Foster a balance between creativity and execution necessary to implement new ideas.
- Take personal steps to get out of your own day-to-day rut.
Program content
Through a series of cases and discussions, this Program will provide you with the tools to:
- Consider "What's Next?" for your firm
- Understand the role of “Lean” in competitiveness
- Stimulate creativity in disciplined environments
- Build a clear link between generating the idea, refining it and implementing the innovation in your business
- Drive an innovation culture
Webinar
Creating Value Through Lean Innovation
Learn how Lean Innovation can help you eliminate non-value adding components of your business, allowing you to focus on innovation.
Watch recorded webinarThe Program includes these main themes:
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Understanding and Applying Lean
- Freeing up internal resources; focus on the 'right less'
- What does the customer want, and where are we wasting our time?
- Applying "Lean" to Innovation – where simple sells
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The Innovation Framework
- Disruptive Innovation and where cannibalization fits
- Story-boarding ideas and Innovation calisthenics
- Getting past the 1.0 version of an idea
- Structuring the organization to support specific ideas
- Innovation and organizational growth; Leadership's Role
- The link to Execution; keep your eye on the prize
Session Leaders
Session leaders include senior professors from Queen's School of Business and knowledgeable experts from industry. These outstanding teachers are constantly in touch with today's business world through real-world business experience, Board memberships and their own consulting practices.
Mr. Barry Cross - Project Management and Lean Innovation, Queen's School of Business
Barry Cross joined Queen’s University in 2006 after spending 20 years in various leadership positions with Magna International, Autosystems Manufacturing and DuPont. While in Industry, Mr. Cross led many key strategic initiatives, including significant development projects in Asia, Brazil, Mexico, and Europe.
Mr. Cross is now an instructor with Queen’s School of Business in Operations Management, Service Management and Project Management. At the Executive level, he speaks regularly on Innovation, Execution and Project Management. His speaking and consulting clients include Samsung, Deloitte, Conference Board of Canada, Encana, LCBO, and others. He has an MBA from Queen’s University, and is the bestselling author of Lean Innovation: Understanding What’s Next in Today’s Economy (CRC Press).
