Lead innovative thinking and practice
On-campus unit delivery combines face-to-face and digital learning. For Online unit delivery, learning is conducted exclusively online.
Aims and objectives
The aim of this unit is to provide individuals who initiate and lead innovation in any industry or community context with the skills and knowledge required to generate, lead and sustain innovative organisational thinking and practice.
The objectives of the unit are to enable initiators and leaders of innovation to:
- Understand the trends shaping their organisation’s current and future thinking and practice.
- Generate ideas and promote creative thinking.
- Assess and reflect on their personal leadership style as it applies to innovative thinking and practice.
- Establish and support a culture of innovation, and
- Create sustainable innovation in their organisations.
Upon completion of this unit participants will be able to:
- Identify and analyse the impact of trends, drivers and enablers on innovative thinking and practice.
- Understand and apply a range of techniques required to generate ideas and promote creative thinking.
- Flex their personal leadership style to adapt to changes impacting innovative thinking and practice in their organisational environment.
- Understand, introduce, and apply strategies required to foster a workplace culture that encourages innovation whilst effectively managing risk.
- Develop, implement, and monitor processes and systems required to establish innovation as an integral and sustainable part of organisational activity.
This unit covers:
- The meaning and core elements of innovation, value, divergent vs convergent thinking, and the innovation spectrum.
- Innovation concepts and philosophies including disruptive innovation, closed vs open innovation, linear vs circular economy, ethical and responsible innovation.
- Drivers and enablers of innovation and methods for researching, analysing and understanding trends and their potential impact.
- The Innovation Process: Problem Space, Solution Space and Implementation Space.
- Continuous improvement approaches including Total Quality Management, Lean and Six Sigma.
- Innovation and new product development approaches including McKinsey’s Three Horizons, Design Thinking, Open Innovation, Crowd sourcing and Co-creation and Blue Ocean Strategy.
- Problem Space methods including Empathise techniques such as visualisation, stakeholder analysis, personas, journey maps. Define techniques including value chain analysis, business process diagrams and developing problem or goal statements.
- Solution Space methods including Ideate techniques such as How Might We? questions, Affinity diagrams, Mindmapping and Reverse Brainstorming. Concept development techniques such as the Napkin Pitch, Prototyping, Simulation and Virtual Reality.
- Implementation Space requirements and the law of diffusion of innovations. Identifying, analysing and managing potential barriers and risks to innovation.
- A model for establishing an integrated innovation management framework, innovation drivers of success and aligning innovation projects with strategy.
- Developing leadership for innovation including the traits of innovative leaders, leadership self-assessment, and the keys to becoming a future ready organisation.
- Developing a culture of innovation including what components motivate creativity in organisations, the elements and success factors required to create a successful knowledge-sharing collaborative culture.