Innovation Training That Changes How Your Organization Works
Courses, certifications, and custom programs that teach your people to find better ideas, communicate them clearly, and test them fast. Then we coach them while they apply it to real work, so the skills stick long after the class ends.
One system. Training for every level of your organization.
Every course teaches the same Innovation Engineering system, so executives, managers, and frontline staff share one language for solving problems and moving ideas forward. Pick the starting point that fits, or let us build a program around your goals.
Innovation Engineering Blue Belt
For leaders of people and projects. Learn to create bigger ideas, persuade others, and deliver new solutions faster, while certifying on a real challenge from your own work with an expert coach.
Proactive Problem Solving
A one-day, all-hands workshop that teaches everyone to stop blaming people, fix flawed systems, and remove the friction from their own work.
Innovation Engineering Mastery
For innovation leaders who will build, improve, and sustain a system for innovation, and train and coach others inside the organization.
Custom Training & Support
Courses tailored to your frameworks and culture, private cohorts, workshops, leadership retreats, LMS-ready curriculum, and ongoing coaching.
Innovation Engineering Blue Belt, for leaders of people and projects.
Learn the skills, techniques, and tools that change how leaders and teams work together to reach goals smarter, faster, and more innovatively. Most organizations start here, because certified leaders become the internal champions who make everything else stick.
At the end of this course, you'll be able to:
Invent More Ideas
Create 8X more big ideas than traditional brainstorming.
Persuade Others
Increase the persuasive power of your writing by up to 5X.
Ship Ideas Faster
Deliver new solutions up to 6X faster with a new work process for development.
Turn Strategy Into Action
Identify and communicate the right problem-solving strategy so your staff is set up for success.
Foster an Innovation Culture
Enable employees, give motivating feedback, and provide direction that focuses their work.
Get Better Solutions From Your Team
Jump start your team's thinking and get concise ideas back, with clear next steps.
What you'll learn
Skills to Create Ideas
- How to recognize a Meaningfully Unique innovation
- How to 6X your creativity without brainstorming
- How to leverage diversity to create ideas
Skills to Communicate Ideas
- How to give purpose to your innovation work
- How to help others see your idea the way you see it
- How to build confidence in your idea using math
Problem-Solving Skills
- How to really run Fail Fast, Fail Cheap® cycles
- Best practices for accelerating success through experimentation
- How to improve decision making with Rapid Research
Your path to certification
Learning happens when you take action. Certification assignments connect your new skills to a real challenge you're facing right now, with fast feedback from an Innovation Engineering Black Belt coach.
- Identify and improve a system you work within
- Define an innovation strategy for yourself or your team
- Gather stimulus from patents, customer insights, market and future trends, and research
- Create Meaningfully Unique ideas, alone or with a group
- Build a business case: a written concept, a math estimate of impact, and the key risks
- Run three Fail Fast, Fail Cheap learning cycles to reduce uncertainty
Three flexible formats
Private or Public In Person
8 to 24 participants. 2 days in person plus 60 days to certify. Held anywhere, including the Eureka! Ranch. A shared experience that unites the team.
Private Virtual Cohort
8 to 24 participants. Four 4-hour sessions plus 60 days to certify, with the option to add up to 2 office hours.
Online Self-Paced
6 months to complete. You choose when and what to tackle, working one-on-one with an online coach.
of Blue Belts apply the skills and mindset to their work.
say they accomplished work they could not have done without the skills or tools.
Where organizations typically begin.
We tailor every engagement to where your organization is today, but most follow the same path: certify leaders first so they can champion the work, then equip everyone to solve problems in their own sphere of influence.
Managers earn Blue Belt
Builds a layer of internal champions with a shared language that reduces friction and speeds up decisions.
All staff attend Proactive Problem Solving
Scales the shift from reactive firefighting to proactive problem ownership across the whole organization.
Innovation leaders earn Black Belt
Develops the people who build and sustain the system, and who train and coach others long after we leave.
Custom courses, workshops, LMS content, and coaching fill in around this path to fit your goals and your existing programs.
Build an Organization That Improves Itself
Not a project. Not an event. A way of working where everyone, not just a few specialists, is equipped to spot what's broken and fix it.
Problem Identification & Definition
- Identify the hallmarks of a real problem
- Find the opportunity within the problem
- Structure the argument for your idea
Creating Solutions
- 3 principles to 5X problem solving
- Finding inspiration and changing perspective
- Fixing broken processes
Reducing Risk & Taking Action
- Quickly learn if your idea will work
- Use math to get support
- Put your idea into action fast
Proactive Problem Solving
It comes down to three behaviors, repeated by everyone, everywhere in the organization, until they stop being a program and start being how work gets done.
Work Smarter
Start with purpose. Look for better care, service, quality, or value within your own area, and build it deliberately instead of hoping it happens.
Stop the Stupid
Start with friction. Find the things that get in the way of good work, the workarounds, the repeat fixes, the frustrations everyone already knows about, and delete them.
Lead Change in Your Sphere of Influence
You do not need a title to fix what is within your reach. Every employee can improve the systems they touch, instead of waiting for someone else to do it.
Employees genuinely love this.
Training programs do not usually earn scores like this, especially not inside industrial and manufacturing workforces who have sat through plenty of trainings they didn't ask for. A Net Promoter Score of 74 means people are not just tolerating this. They're recommending it.
That matters because adoption is the whole game. A system nobody wants to use never gets the chance to compound.
Stop blaming people. Start fixing systems.
Most organizations default to a reactive posture: something breaks, someone gets blamed, the underlying system stays exactly the same and breaks again next month. Stop the Stupid is a different posture entirely.
Reactive Posture
- Fix the individual mistake, not the cause
- Blame lands on whoever was closest to the problem
- The same flawed workflow breaks again later
- Managers spend their days firefighting instead of leading
Proactive Posture
- Find the flawed system causing the mistake
- Fix it once, permanently, so it cannot recur
- Workers are trusted partners in the fix, not suspects
- Managers get their time back for actual leadership
Fix what people hate first. Trust follows.
Before a team will tackle the big, politically complicated systems, they need to see that leadership is willing to fix the small things that have been quietly frustrating them for years. That trust has to be earned, and it's usually earned fast.
Jenny's Back Hurt for Five Years. It Took One Session to Fix.
During a training session at Kaivac, a commercial cleaning equipment manufacturer, Doug Hall asked the room a simple question: does anyone know anything "stupid" about how they work? One employee, Jenny Myers, raised her hand. Her back had hurt for five years, from lifting heavy machines into boxes for shipping, every shift.
Instead of writing it down for later, the team stopped the training and ran a live inventing session right there in the room. The fix: build the box around the machine instead of building the box first and lifting the machine into it. Jenny's back stopped hurting.
Because the fix solved something that had actually caused her pain, Jenny became one of its loudest advocates on the floor. That's what fixing frontline friction first actually buys you: real, earned trust, not a mandate from the top.
One standard way to communicate an idea, every time.
Most meetings run on half-formed pitches. Someone names a frustration, someone else floats a fix, and the room is left guessing whether it's actually a good idea or just the first thing anyone thought of. That makes it nearly impossible to compare ideas fairly or move the strong ones forward with confidence.
A Yellow Card forces discipline before creativity. Instead of a vague pitch, every idea gets written down the same way, so the problem is clear, the fix is clear, and anyone hearing it for the first time can see exactly why it's worth doing.
Once the problem is clear, we don't just brainstorm.
A typical brainstorm gets whatever's already in the room. A structured Create Session deliberately pulls in outside thinking first, so the team isn't just recombining the same six ideas everyone already had.
Customer Mining
What customers actually need, want, and struggle with, beyond what they say in a survey.
Market Mining
What competitors and adjacent industries are already doing, tried, or abandoned.
Wisdom Mining
What research, experts, and history already know about a problem like this one.
Technology Mining
What new tools, equipment, or technical approaches could solve this differently.
Future Mining
Where trends are heading, so the fix holds up past this quarter.
Unrelated Mining
How a completely different industry solved a structurally similar problem.
Fear is what kills good ideas before they get tested.
An idea that threatens someone's job, budget, or ego gets quietly smothered long before anyone can prove whether it actually works. The fix isn't more courage. It's making testing small, fast, and cheap enough that trying something stops feeling risky.
Design a Small Test
Not the whole rollout, just enough of a test to learn whether the idea holds up in the real world.
Run It, Fast
Run the test quickly, so a wrong guess costs almost nothing to find out.
Stop. Think. Learn.
Pause before reacting. The real question isn't what happened, it's what we actually learned from it.
Pivot, Don't Panic
Most ideas need more than one loop before they work. That's expected, not a sign something went wrong.
This isn't another continuous improvement framework.
Lean, Six Sigma, and most continuous improvement programs are excellent at control and discipline. They tend to run out of road in the same place: generating the actual ideas that fix what's broken, and getting people to try them without fear of getting it wrong.
Typical Improvement Programs
- "Brainstorm it" is usually the entire ideation method
- Driven by a quality department or small group of experts
- Fear of failure quietly kills bold ideas before testing
- Improvement happens in scheduled projects and events
Proactive Problem Solving
- Structured stimulus mining and Create Sessions generate real ideas
- Every employee is equipped to lead change in their sphere
- Fast, low-cost PDSA testing removes the fear of trying
- Improvement becomes how work gets done, every day
Proactive Problem Solving, by Doug Hall
Doug Hall wrote the playbook behind everything on this page. It lays out the philosophy, the tools, and the real-world stories, like Jenny's, that show what happens when an entire organization is equipped to find and fix what's broken instead of waiting for someone else to do it.
Every Proactive Problem Solving participant receives a copy.
Learn More About the BookInnovation Engineering Black Belt, for the people who build the system.
The Mastery Course with Black Belt Certification is for innovation leaders and experienced innovators. It condenses the full, peer-reviewed Innovation Engineering curriculum taught at universities into corporate education, then applies it to your organization's biggest challenges over 12 months, with a personal coach.
You'll be an expert innovator, able to
- Invent category-disrupting ideas for new products, services, businesses, brands, and markets
- Apply innovative process improvement to radically accelerate development
- Build winning business cases with a complete concept, business model, and persuasive justification
And an innovation systems expert, able to
- Build and sustain a culture of innovation so your team innovates reliably at every level
- Improve broken human systems and bust the bureaucracies restraining growth
- Train and coach others in smarter ways to innovate within their own roles
Personal Black Belt coach, meeting every 2 to 3 weeks
Typical ROI Black Belts earn on their training
Bigger projects than those with a basic understanding
More projects led or coached, on average
Training built around your organization, not the other way around.
Every organization starts from a different place. We use our expertise in instructional design and innovation to tailor training to your existing frameworks, culture, and development programs, and we stay with you after the training ends.
Custom Course Development
Courses designed around your challenges and goals, built to fit within the Lean, Six Sigma, Design Thinking, or leadership programs you already run.
Private Cohorts
Have 8 or more people to train? We run private courses virtually or in person, facilitated anywhere, including at the Eureka! Ranch.
LMS-Ready Curriculum
100+ education modules, video lessons, and self-guided badge tracks that plug into your LMS, Center of Excellence, or workforce programs.
How-to in 2 Hours® Workshops
Fun, hands-on primers for offsites, conferences, and lunch-and-learns: Innovation Overview, Strategy Activation, Meaningful Uniqueness, Fail Fast Fail Cheap, and more.
Leadership Retreats
For team and organization leaders who need to lead, enable, and sustain a culture of innovation, and align on strategic priorities.
Coaching & Tools
Expert Black Belt coaches plus the JumpStartYourBrain® platform, with cloud-based tools for running Create Sessions, testing ideas, and managing projects.
Not sure where to start?
Tell us what you're trying to change. We'll recommend the right mix of courses, certifications, and support for your team's size, goals, and starting point.
Training people keep using after the class ends.
Most training is forgotten within weeks. Ours is designed so the skills get applied to real work, with real feedback, until they become habit.
Patented Cycles to Mastery® Method
Instead of lecture-then-test, learners work through cycles with built-in feedback from a human grader, and can resubmit until they've mastered the skill. It's measured 4X more effective than traditional classroom instruction.
Applied to Your Challenges, With a Coach
Certification assignments are built around problems your people are facing right now, so the training pays for itself while they learn, guided by an experienced Black Belt coach.
Academically Validated
Innovation Engineering is a recognized field of study, taught for college credit and grounded in data from 26,000+ real-world projects. Courses come from the Innovation Engineering Institute, a partnership with the University of Maine.
An organization that keeps getting better, on its own.
Let's talk about which training fits your team, from Blue Belt and Proactive Problem Solving to a program built just for you.
Schedule a Call