Innovation Engineering Black Belt
Certification CourseBecome an expert innovator
an expert system-thinker
and a persuasive strategic leader.
AT THE END OF THIS COURSE
YOU’LL BE AN EXPERT INNOVATOR
& ABLE TO:
Invent Category-Disrupting Ideas
Apply Innovative Process Improvement
Build Winning Business Cases
AND
YOU’LL BE AN INNOVATION SYSTEMS EXPERT
& ABLE TO:
Build & Sustain a Culture of Innovation
Improve Broken Human System(s)
Bust bureaucracies that are restraining growth and resources in teams, companies, or communities
Train & Coach Others
Building Innovation Capabilities.
Creating a culture.
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.
PATENTED TEACHING METHOD. MASTERY-LEVEL LEARNING. UNREASONABLY MASSIVE SUPPORT.
Patented Cycles to Mastery® Teaching Method + Personalized Projects + Private Coaching
200-400% increase in learning versus the traditional training approach
Using this method, you learn by doing! Using the patented Cycles to Mastery method, your instructor guides you through a series of learning cycles. Each cycle has a built-in assessment, like a quiz or a feedback loop. And each cycle can be attempted an unlimited number of times in order to pass it.
But don’t stress that this work is just a pile on. The program is customized for you. Your personal innovation coach meets with you to create a Personalized plan of what you’ll work on during your certification – applying it work challenges you have right now. Your private coach will then meet with you every 2-3 weeks to help you as you make the learning real.
Innovation Fundamentals Review
- Meaningful Uniqueness
- Stimulus & Diversity
- Strategy Activation
- Concept Writing
- Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA)
Systems Thinking
- Appreciation for a System
- Knowledge about Variation
- Psychology
- Theory of Knowledge
Driving Strategic Alignment
- Strategy Activation
- Vertical Alignment
- Future Mining
Building the Innovation Mindset
- Diffusion of Innovation Mindset
- Optimizing the Whole
- Advanced Benefit & Proof
- Estimating Value
- Meaningful Marketing Messages
Collaboration and Ideation
- Collaboration Systems
- Professional Grade Create Sessions
- Unrelated Mining
- Patent Mining
- Insight Mining
- Market Mining
- Wisdom Mining
Innovation Pipeline and Development System
- Departmental Alignment
- Innovation Decisions
- Business Opportunity Recommendation
- Organizing for Success
- Advanced Create Methods
- Proactive Selling Pitches
Rapid Research & Data-Driven Decision Making
- Rapid Research Operations
- Oomph
- Concept Feedback Systems
Investing in Intellectual Property
- Patent ROI
- Proprietary Protection
- Technology Translation
Forecasting Innovation ROI
- Rapid Research Analytics
- Cost & Price Estimating
- PDSA Reducing Variation in Forecasts
- Business Models
Personal Leadership Development
- Personal Leadership
- Organizing for Success
- Real World Communications
PERSONAL INNOVATION COACH FOR 12 MONTHS
Learning new skills is one thing, putting them into practice is another – particularly if your organization needs strong innovation improvement. That’s why you get your very own Expert Innovation Engineering Black Belt Coach will meet with you every 2-3 weeks to give you personalized support, feedback and coaching. Each coach has worked with 100s of leaders to help them win in innovation.
Real-World Challenges tackled by previous Innovation Engineering Black Belts through their certification:
- Improving an existing Stage-and-Gate Development System to include a more robust front-end
- Inventing and Delivering a patented new “leap” innovation
- Creating a new Growth Category for the Organization (that accounts for 21% of our domestic revenue just 6 months after launch)
- Creating an “Internal Innovation Coaching Agency” inside a large non-profit
- Reinventing strategic planning to increase alignment, buy-in and actionabilty
- Creating a customer panel to reduce research time from weeks to hour
- Organizational Design restructuring to allow for internal innovation intern rotations and cross-functional training
- Developing a robust 3-year innovation pipeline
- Streamlining the customer request system to reduce response time and allow for more proactive business development
Why THIS COURSE IS different
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.
This course is brought to you by the Innovation Engineering Institute – a partnership between the Eureka! Ranch and the University of Maine.
It’s a true mastery program –
5 college worth courses of content
plus 12 months of application to your work
with the guidance of an experienced IE Black Belt.
it has fast-tracked me to having high visibility with our board,
it has offered me perspective I may have paid thousands of dollars to a counselor to receive,
it has helped me find a meaningfully unique way to delight our customers,
and it has given me firsthand a swift kick in the pants that reignited my passion for life, exploration, and embracing the unknown to learn from it, not to be scared of it.
It has reminded me of who I am.
When I encounter day-to-day problems in my professional or personal life, I tend to think immediately of what IE exercises or sessions I could do to solve them.
Ultimately, I’ve come to realize that I could apply the principles of IE in any facet of my life, perhaps by habit, and believe that to be true to the core spirit.
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 with out thought.
Before this process I would typically want to be 100% sure of a project before digging into in, I did not want to fail. Now using the fail fast fail cheap or plan do study act mythology gives me 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 live skills that I can use thought my future, in industry and my personal dealings.
I preface my reflection with the above for the reason that I don’t want this to come off as insincere. I don’t drink the Kool aid. I quietly criticize people who drink the Kool aid and mentally break down why they shouldn’t be so happy about their newfound shiny object. However, I have not been able to stop talking about Innovation Engineering and my time at Eureka Ranch since returning. I regularly have found ways to utilize one of its tools, help out a colleague struggling with an issue by helping frame their problem in terms of the bigger system so that they could approach it differently, and at least weekly, I remind my senior leadership of the phrase “fail fast, fail cheap”. One might say I drank the Kool Aid…however I see a set of tools that came to our organization with the most perfect timing in our history.
I have so much more to learn, but my main takeaway is this: from the CEO to the night shift staff, people are thirsty to learn the techniques and systems of Innovation Engineering. After doing a 3 minute mind mapping activity with my VP in a 1 on 1 setting, she was giggling with delight at how creative she felt, and couldn’t wait to have me show the rest of the team. I showed her how that translates into clearly communicating ideas on a yellow card, and then running these ideas through the gauntlet of PDSA. We saw that there was an idea we killed after a year of work and well over $250k in expenses, that we would have killed MUCH sooner had we had a more organized process and a better grasp of estimating first year sales combined with the need for quick revision of our inherent assumptions through cycles PDSA.
We are building a new culture together, and the entire organization is incredibly receptive.
FAQs
Who is this course for?
- existing leaders
- developing leaders
- anyone with innovation in their title or responsibility set
- entrepreneurs
- intrapreneurs
- current and aspiring innovators
How long will this course take to complete?
Your coursework and certification work is broken out into the following activities.
Prework BEFORE each Virtual Meetup: To prepare for the interactive group meeting, you’ll be asked to watch Video Lessons related to the month’s focus area. Time to view these lessons ranges from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.
Virtual Monthly Meetups: We’ll meet once per month with your cohort for 90-120 Minutes.
Coursework:Â Practice a new set of skills each month related to the month’s theme. Plan on spending 2-4 hours on these mini homework assignments for which you will get one on one feedback from your instructor.
Certification Project Work: Time on task for your certification work is variable. Depending on the size and scope of the project you choose. You’ll have a coach to help you choose and guide your work throughout the entire 9 month experience. The good news is – the certification work is about you applying your new skills to your EXISTING WORK. So it’s not a new “to-do” list for you. Instead it’s a more inventive way to get done what you need to get done anyway.