By: Geoff Gibbins, Director at ?What If! Innovation
After 25 years of making innovation happen within established organizations, we’re launching a new on-demand service to help make corporate innovation teams more successful.
As the pace of change accelerates, innovation has risen to the top of the corporate agenda. And corporations are seeing first hand that it’s more important to adapt than to be right. They need to become experimentation engines. But that requires new ways of thinking and working.
So there’s growing pressure for DIY Innovation — for corporations to be inventive by themselves — not just hire consultants or buy innovation from startups, creating a culture of learning and agility that attracts talent and speeds time to market.
Driven by this, the past few years have seen the explosive growth of a new role: the corporate innovator. Corporate innovators are tasked with running innovation projects that harness the scale and assets their corporation has access to. On LinkedIn, 11,000 people now have the job title “Innovation Manager,” with more added every month.
But it’s tough to be a corporate innovator.
There’s pressure to perform, but no clear path. There are so many new tools and methods, but few actionable systems that help you know when to use them, or how to practically apply them in a corporate setting.
And it can get lonely. Corporate innovators often lack community.
Over the last 25 years, ?What If! has been on the front lines of developing innovation as a profession. Through thousands of innovation projects, we’ve become the world’s best at understanding the people side of innovation — the values, behaviors, skills, mindsets and spirit that make a difference between a smart idea on paper and a living, thriving business. Our top innovations have generated over $70 billion of value.
That’s why, today, we’re launching The ?What If! Toolkit: the on-demand service that keeps corporate innovators at the cutting edge.
It helps to guide corporate innovation teams from problem to prototype to impact, using agile experimentation and inventive ways of working.
Subscribers get:
Actionable learning: Practical ‘learning by doing’ exercises
Tools and templates: everyday inspiration, tips and templates
Practitioner updates: ongoing access to the latest methods
On-demand support: from our own inventors and other corporate innovators
We use The ?What If! Toolkit to keep our own inventors at the cutting edge, and now it’s available on a subscription basis — by itself or alongside training, coaching and live innovation projects.
To schedule a demo and get access to introductory pricing, get in touch with Geoff Gibbins, a Director in our NYC office: geoff.gibbins@whatifinnovation.com. Follow us on Twitter @Whatifglobal
