Innovation Engineering Mastery + Black Belt Certification
Instructor-Led | Online Cohort
Become an Expert Innovator
Ideas for anything from new products, services & systems to businesses, brands, offerings, and new markets.
Become a Persuasive Strategic Leader
Create a complete concept, business model and persuasive justification for your innovations
Become an Innovation System Architect
Architect the systems to radically accelerate the development of novel, disruptive innovations.
Learn the Skills to Lead Your Organization into a New Innovative Future
This course and certification give you the expertise in 3 areas to lead innovation and problem solving across your department or organization.
Real Business Outcomes
This course isn’t theoretical. Every step of the way you’ll apply the skills you’re learning to your organization in real-time. You’ll get real time coaching through 5 major application projects. Each project not only brings value to your organization, but it cements your learning through first hand, relevant experience of the tools and methods in the course. Through the course you will execute:
A Formal or Informal Brainstorming Session*
*Not your grandpa’s brainstorming session.
Start with a crystal clear objective and leave with tangible out puts.
Run Multiple Rounds of Concept Testing
Learn how to use fast feedback to evolve your idea.
A System for Estimating the Value of Ideas
Build a model that others can use for future projects.
A Trademark or Patent Evaluation
Understand the process to assess the viability of owning a name or technology.
A Complete System Map & System Improvements
Make your current innovation system visible and identify opportunities to improve it.
A Customized Innovation Development System
A Structure & Definition of Your Department's or Organization's Innovation Strategy
Innovation Training for Your Organization
What You’ll Learn
At the Mastery Course, you’ll learn the skills that make up the Innovation Engineering “Body of Knowledge” – the complete academic peer-reviewed curriculum taught in Innovation Engineering undergraduate and graduate school programs across the world. In the Mastery Course, the instruction has been condensed for corporate education so that anyone can participate.
Topics Covered Include:
- Innovation Fundamentals
- Systems Thinking
- Driving Strategic Alignment
- Building the Innovation Mindset
- Collaboration and Ideation
- Innovation Pipeline and Development Systems
- Rapid Research & Data-Driven Decision Making
- Forecasting Innovation ROI
- Personal Leadership Development
How It Works
Unlike other courses, this training was built from the ground up to take advantage of the benefits provided by an online cohort instead of simply moving an in-person course to a digital format.
In fact, in this course you get the best of both worlds – you will be able to take advantage of the immediacy of an online course while still having the support and collaboration of an in-person course.
Video Lessons
- If you have not taken the Innovation Engineering Fundamentals course, you will complete about 1/2 day of lessons with videos, quick quizzes, and assignments that cover the Fundamentals before the first meetup. If you have taken fundamentals there is a 60-minute refresher.
- Before each weekly meetup, you’ll complete about 60 minutes of video lessons. Each video covers a skill within the topic area that you will experience during your next meetup. The videos provide a foundation of understanding and a very easy way to revisit key concepts when you are working on applying Innovation Engineering with teams in your organization.
Online Group Meetups
Every week you’ll meet with your instructor(s) and a group of peers for 2.5 hours. As a group you will:
- Leverage the diversity of the group during hands-on activities where you see, feel, and experience the skills you learned through the Video Lessons. It’s through this first-person experience that you’ll gain confidence in the tools and techniques to take what you learn and apply it to your organization.
- Plan for your Practical Application, where you’ll apply the topic area of the week to your organization. Create an outline that will provide guidance for your implementation.
- Discuss previous or ongoing Practical Applications so we can share useful learnings and experiences, plus ask questions amongst peers and instructors offering real-time support and problem-solving.
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Practical Applications
- Experience real-time ROI when you apply what you are learning in class to your work. Guided by your instructors, you will be driving your strategic missions forward leading to tangible results.
- During the time between meetups you will be applying what you learn, to do things such as: investigating IP protection for ideas, developing systems for estimating the internal or external value of ideas, building or enhancing your idea development system, and more.
What is the Innovation Engineering Difference
Why This Course is Different
Unlike other business courses that are based on a few personal experiences or third-person research – this course is grounded in front-lines innovation work and hard data from the world’s largest database (25,000+) on what drives success and failure. The data is so reliable that the curriculum, called Innovation Engineering, is recognized as a new field of academic study with undergraduate and graduate degrees offered at colleges and universities.
World leaders in business and innovation who’ve used these methods include: Walt Disney, Nike, Pepsi-Cola, American Express, Procter & Gamble, US Department of Commerce and thousands of others.
It Includes the fundamental elements of popular innovation techniques like empathy and journey mapping, Lateral Thinking, PDSA, Lean, Six Sigma and many more. But perhaps the most powerful thing it does is put everything together into a cohesive system.
This course is brought to you by the Innovation Engineering Institute – a partnership between the Eureka! Ranch and the University of Maine.
Participant Reflections
At the end of the course, each person submits a final reflection – a mindful review of their experience and what they really took away. Here is a handful of excerpts from some of our certified Innovation Engineering Black Belts.
Innovation engineering brought a different frame of mind/thinking to my innovation process. My past trainings were almost exclusively focused on consumers; segmentation work, empathy mapping, personas, etc. The remainder of the process was more about how to motivate consumers and customers through various incentives (price, value, consistency, “free stuff”, etc.).
Innovation engineering was the first innovation training I have been a part of that was process driven. Instead of relying on identifying insights through consumer behaviors, using modeling and stimuli such as spark decks to get to an outcome is a much more sustainable and systemic process.
In the work life, we are in the process of launching a stage-gate system for new products. We have included blue cards, yellow cards, and Monte Carlo simulations to that process. We have also added spark decks and patent mining to the pre-stage gate idea generation system. The process is being set up to have as few special case errors as that message was also driven home well by the Innovation Engineering class.
Innovation Engineering (IE): At first I wondered how the idea of innovation is engineering, but it only took 1 or 2 pre-course videos to understand that by definition: that is exactly what IE is. The design, building, and use of engines (systems) to create innovative ideas… or as described to us and how I describe it to others now: “Doing Cool Shit that matters”. From my perspective, the course was perfectly timed in my career. As I take part in brand creation, extensions, and product offerings for our customers- using the tools (and building some of our own) that IE offers have helped me and my company fail faster, fail cheaper, and improve our system for product innovation. To add to that, having a professional perspective on internal product innovation and internal systems certainly helped in the application of course material… mainly in that we, unfortunately, have some broken systems to fix! For the rest of my career, I will remember that 94% of the issues we have are from a poor system and only 6% are due to the worker(s) in said system.
…From my perspective I am passionate about the IE course because of the DO aspect of it. You learn the skills, but then put it to use in application and lab assignments. Failing helps teach and learning it in the IE environment is a lot cheaper lesson than using thousands of dollars of company time and resources on a failed idea.
This training process has changed my life, anyone that knows me I am not a people person, when I told them that I was teaching this IE course at work they can not believe it. I am also surprised myself.
Many of the IE mythologies have become deeply ingrained into my subconscious brain. I look at things/ideas differently now and use the IE tools without thought.
Before this process I would typically want to be 100% sure of a project before digging into it, I did not want to fail. Now using the fail fast fail cheap or plan do study act mythology gives me the confidence to try new things in uncharted territory and even if it fails you have not failed. Rather learn from your mistakes and move on to the next learning cycle.
I believe the skills I have been exposed to through the IE black-belt certification are life skills that I can use thought my future, in industry, and in my personal dealings.
Cost for Course + Certification
$12,000 per student – If you have attended fundamentals email Corie@EurekaRanch.com to learn if you may have a credit.
Online Self Paced
Get started when you are ready, moving at your own pace up to your 12-month certification deadline.
Self Paced Coursework
You will work through the 9 modules of the course at your own pace. Each module contains video lessons and practice assignments. Watch and submit online, then receive feedback, revise and submit again until you’ve gained a master of each skill or tool. It is recommended to work through one module per month, although you’ll have a full 12 months to complete the 9 modules.
One on One Coaching
You will connect one on one every 3 weeks with your Innovation Engineering certification coach. During these sessions, you will receive feedback, ask questions and work together to create a plan for your application assignments.
Certification
Certification is achieved when 100% of all the coursework is passed.