If you're developing an innovation strategy initiative inside your company, is your primary focus on bringing executives together in a creative way to imagine new ideas?

That's the focus some companies get enamored with based on innovation training that puts creativity front and center as the key to jump starting innovation.

From our experience, that’s far from the first step.

Sure, the idea of getting everyone together for a creativity session is a sexy part of innovation.

But convening executives for a creativity session is the right step ONLY AFTER you've done a lot of decidedly non-sexy innovation strategy work. All the pre-work will suggest whether an in-person session even makes sense and how to make it successful if it does.

9 Critical Steps Before Your Innovation Strategy Gets Sexy

What are the non-sexy upfront steps in an innovation strategy?

Here's a checklist:

1. Setting appropriate objectives
2. Gathering internal and external input
3. Internal fact-finding
4. Surveying external sources and environments for relevant ideas
5. Conducting analysis
6. Synthesizing pre-work into themes and directions to shape the innovation strategy (and workshop)
7. Determining which parties will disproportionately contribute to an in-person innovation strategy workshop
8. Designing the right type of workshop to help participants maximize their contributions
9. Planning all the logistics and experience variables for the in-person workshop

Yes, those are all significant steps BEFORE you ever conduct a creativity session or in-person innovation strategy meeting.

Yet these steps may get insufficient attention in quickie innovation training classes because they:

• Happen outside the organizational limelight
• Can be ill-defined and cumbersome
• Aren’t as sexy as facilitating a creative workshop

Here are two warnings:

1. If the innovation training you’re attending goes right to how to have a creative workshop with executives, you’ve chosen the wrong training.
2. If an outside company that is supposed to help with your innovation strategy goes right to the details of scheduling an in-person workshop, you’ve chosen the wrong partner.

If you find yourself in either of these situations, get creative about getting away FAST! – Mike Brown

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