Cohort Kickoff & Meetups

We’ll kick off your cohort with an online Zoom meetup where you will not only meet your primary Innovation Engineering Black coach, but you’ll also discuss what you hope to learn and where and how you hope to apply your skills.

Then the team will jump right into the self-paced online course as outlined below.  As a private group, you have the option to coordinate all cohort members so you’ll complete the same amount of education between meetups, but we’ve found it’s best to let each member go at their own pace over the 6-month Innovation Engineering Blue Belt certification period.  That way you and your cohort members can do more/less of certain content depending on what’s relevant to the current challenges you’re facing.

After the kickoff, your cohort will do virtual meetups as scheduled by the team leader.  The meetups will act as “office hours” where participants have the chance to ask questions and get insights from a seasoned Innovation Engineering coach.  It’s done over a 1-hour Zoom session, and questions are answered in a group format.  So even though an issue may be surfaced by one person, everyone can get the value of the answer and its context.

Training

The team will get started in the course by completing the Welcome to Innovation Engineering introductory lesson, where everyone will learn how to navigate the course page and submit assignments.  This lesson will also help them decide how they’d like to progress through this course.   Then they’ll have 6 months to complete the following:

Video Micro-Lessons for each sub-skill listed in the prior section.  From our 35+ years of experience innovating for some of the world’s biggest organizations, we’ve found these to be the fundamental core innovation skills every person should have.  Videos last on average about 7 minutes and are followed by up to three multiple-choice quiz questions, which must be completed successfully as the first step of the Cycles to Mastery process before moving on to the Lab Exercises.

Lab Exercises where the team will apply what they’ve learned in the videos to case studies to bring the theory to life.  They’ll complete and submit their work and receive grading and expert coaching from a certified Innovation Engineering coach.  When they’re applying these skills for the first time, they will sometimes fail.  (A good lesson for all would-be innovators!)  This is why our coaches are there to give the team fast feedback, ideas, insights, and advice.

Applications where the team applies their learning to a real-world challenge.  When it comes to learning and innovation, it all happens when you take action.  This is why we’ve created a collection of certification assignments that help the team connect the dots between their real-world challenges and their new innovation skills.  Again, we’re here to provide one-on-one grading and coaching as they submit, receive feedback, adjust, and resubmit assignments until all are approved.  The application assignments help the team:

• Identify and improve a system they work within.
• Define a strategic mission they will create ideas for.
• Do research on their mission in multiple areas that include: patents, customer insights, market trends, future trends, academic articles, and unrelated stimuli.
• Use their new skills and tools to create meaningfully unique ideas for their mission – by themselves or with a group.
• Define an idea including a written concept, a math estimate for the impact of the idea, and initial risks associated with the idea.
• Run three cycles of learning (Plan, Do, Study, Act) on their idea to start to reduce uncertainty on one or more risks with the idea.

Reflection to step back and personally reflect on what they have learned during this course.  We ask that they submit a “significant” reflection, meaning that their writing needs to communicate a deeper level of thought, insight, and analysis than just restating what they did.  We find that this helps ensure they will continue to apply what they‘ve learned in your work and throughout their life moving forward.

Certification is achieved when all of their work is approved 100% within the 6-month period.  No “certification” test is needed.  That’s what we mean by Cycles to Mastery.  The team’s certified Innovation Engineering instructors will ensure that they have mastered the fundamental skills of Innovation Engineering.