PROGRAM
What is i6?
The i6 program is a multi-faceted approach to introducing innovation and developing an innovation culture. We designed the program to build your competencies in the 6Cs of innovation: character, culture, capacity, creativity in collaboration, communicating change, and accepting the challenge.
Three-Tiered Approach
IN i6, THERE ARE THREE LEVELS OF INTENSITY.
i6 CORE
A thorough coverage of every aspect of innovation.
i6 PLUS
Added depth in our coaching services.
i6 MAX
Value-added services for the maximum experience.
WHICH LEVEL TO CHOOSE?
We make recommendations based on the results of an in-depth survey assessment of your company.
If innovation is indeed a journey, there are at least six things you will need to succeed.
CHARACTER:
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Without a gardener, there is no garden. Without a fully prepared executive team, innovation and change won’t happen. We begin your innovation journey with an intensive six-week program that guides your team toward key behaviours and causes those efforts to flow throughout your company.
CULTURE:
BUILD IT CONSCIOUSLY
You need your people behind you. The next thing you'll need on this journey is the support and cooperation of many people inside your company. Your current culture served you well in the past, but the work world has changed, and you need a culture that supports your growth and innovation aspirations. We'll map out your existing culture and work with you to design a culture that suits your company and recommend ways to reinforce the new culture.
CAPACITY TO DEVELOP IDEAS
INTO RESULTS
You need new ideas. New ideas are the source of new products or improvements that generate revenues or new processes that help reduce costs. You need new ideas to flow freely. So, you will need a complete but straightforward method to manage ideas and see results. We introduce you to these methods and fit them into your existing administration.
CREATIVITY IN COLLABORATION:
STAFF DEVELOPMENT
The best source of new ideas is from the people who see the situation every day. The individual contributors who know your systems and know what needs to be reinvented. We deliver a program of Focused Training™ in personal creativity and creative teamwork to fuel those individual contributors.
COMMUNICATING CHANGE:
INTERNAL MESSAGE MANAGEMENT
Pursing a program of innovation means introducing change. From the beginning of an engagement, we face change directly. When the time is right, use our recommendations to deploy many forms of communication to build interest and reduce resistance.
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED: APPLYING NEW
SKILLS TO GET RESULTS
Armed with new skills, methods, and mindsets, your employees are ready to take on the challenge of asking tough questions and seeking novel answers. The i6 program concludes with the 90-Day Challenge™, the perfect opportunity to get results from your investments. Working in person and remotely, our consultants coach your teams through those crucial first projects.
Here's what we do and how we do it.
We work from the Inside Out.
BUILD INNOVATION CHAMPIONS.
A key feature of your culture is leadership, and this is where the work begins. It is critical for your leadership team to be champions of innovation—and of the changes it requires. The first 6 weeks of an engagement will ground your executive team in the fundamentals of emotional intelligence, personal performance, and psychological safety, giving them the opportunity to be true leaders of innovation. Each idea they encounter is cascaded down into the entire organization. This will infuse the executive team with the foundational mindset, establish a shared language, and develop individual capabilities.
We start where you are.
UNDERSTAND THE CULTURE.
To be successful, we focus next on your culture. Even before we work together to build an innovation strategy, we need to understand you existing culture. We use that map as the starting point for important discussions about the kind of culture you want - and need - to support innovation. Without this human foundation, many innovation initiatives fail.
We build a plan with you.
MAP YOUR INNOVATION ASPIRATIONS.
No two companies are the same, so no two innovation plans will be the same. Next in our work together, we convene a strategy session with our team and yours to document your aspirations, whether that is recovery, stability, growth, or new directions. This innovation strategy acts as a compass for the rest of the innovation journey. If will form a critical component to choosing and developing new business ideas. The result is a customized strategy that uses best practises and your team's insight to move forward.
We take managing change seriously.
HOPE ISN'T A STRATEGY.
Managing innovation means managing change. Instead of relying on hope or coercion, we face change head on. This includes focused executive development on the dynamics of change, an interactive seminar in imagining reinvention for all involved, and specialized training for frontline supervisors and managers in how to execute real, healthy change. In addition, we introduce the communication tools you can use throughout the program.
We prepare everyone to contribute.
DEVELOP AND SPREAD CAPACITY.
Early in the process, we will work with you to select the first cohort of future innovators. Their training begins during the Fulfilled Leader™ program. To help uncover and mobilize the talents of your employees, the training continues with work on personal creativity and creative teamwork. To ensure the future spread of innovation skills and ideas, we help develop you own employees to deliver future training for the rest of your staff.
We build a simple but effective method.
INSTALL THE INNOVATION ENGINE™
Most of what has been written about innovation management assumes that the company is quite large; but we know that SMEs are different. You likely don't have spare resources for open innovation, for an incubator, for investing in start ups, or for staff who do nothing but steer innovation. Instead, our process is founded on the idea that any one of you employees can contribute ideas and see them developed. We set up a process that gathers ideas, validates them, and tests them against your innovation strategy before any more work is invested in them.
We help you get it right.
PRACTICE BY USING THE PROCESS.
In the past, management consultants would conclude their work by delivering a fat report and then disappear. Not us. We are different than Big Consulting. We consider getting results to be a better use of your money and our time. For the final 6 weeks, we lead or coach work sessions with idea teams or decision committees to help them practise their new skills in having ideas, thinking them through, or assessing their value. When an assignment ends, you are assured that not only do your employees have the right skills, but they are able and eager to use them.
We leave you with a roadmap.
YOUR JOURNEY CONTINUES.
If innovation is a journey, your innovation strategy is your compass. Before we finish an assignment, we leave you with a roadmap to continue the journey. We offer customized recommendations for continuing the reinvention of your company, sustaining culture change, and activating the innovation process. It won't be one of those fat consultant reports, but it will be rich with detail that applies directly to you and your goals.
Conclusion
IT'S TIME TO THINK ABOUT SMART GROWTH.
Most people think innovation is either messy or magical, but they are mostly wrong. By working deliberately to manage the 6Cs of innovation, you raise the potential for innovation to become one of your core competencies. Don't risk your company's potential for growth with a partial solution, or no solution at all.
What makes i6 so effective?
You know how to manage today’s business efficiently. The i6 program combines all the elements needed to for a disciplined search for tomorrow’s business. Such ambidexterity is essential for forward progress in these challenging times. Let Inside Innovation help you gain new skills for growth.
LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW OUR INNOVATION MANAGEMENT CONSULTING SERVICE WILL WORK FOR YOU.
CONTACT USThe Inside Innovation Difference
The Inside Innovation Difference
YOUR FEE IS AFFORDABLE.
Big Consulting pays entry-level workers $200,000 a year to start. That's awfully high, and then they mark up those rates to earn a dollar. Imagine how much they would actually charge you for an eight-month engagement!? Not us. You are getting top-tier talent at every position for far less than you'd expect.
YOU GET THE INTENSE FOCUS OF SENIOR CONSULTANTS.
Inside Innovation Consulting is structured to mobilize only focused time with the best consultants in the marketplace. We combine those contributions into a single, seamless, management consulting service we call i6. There are no junior consultants in the background.
YOU ARE ONLY DEALING WITH TRAINED FACILITATORS AND COACHES.
Big Consulting usually sends out young, relatively inexperienced smart guys or technology evangelists to advise you. Not us. Each Inside Innovation Consulting consultant has earned their expertise the hard way, over time, and each one is also studied in the art of coaching, delivering insight and relevant help to busy executives like you. We think like owners because we are owners and because we've worked with owners.
YOU RECEIVE AUTHENTIC SERVICE.
We don't arrive at your site looking for more projects to do. Some consultants thrive with the "land and expand" approach. Not us. We arrive focused on the innovation consulting you hired us to deliver, and our aim throughout an engagement is to empower your employees - and the entire organization - to innovate independently when we are done.
THE LEARNING EXPERIENCES ARE BRIEF AND WELL-TIMED.
Staff training is essential to your innovation success, but truly effective learning take precious time. We have designed a selection of trainings that move audiences toward toward your growth aspirations. The learning experiences are long enough to be meaningful yet short enough to be fully digested and internalized. We are no "sage-on-the-stage," and we have deliberately timed the training to be followed by an extended period of practise to anchor and reinforce learning.
YOUR CULTURE AND EMPLOYEES ARE OUR FOCUS.
Some of innovation management is about process, but most of it is about people. Other consultants treat culture like it's just a topic of conversation. Not us. We treat it like it's the blood and bones of your organization, the essence of things. For us, people are the organizing principle.
