I would caution you to first develop even a rudimentary "innovation system" before you start raising people's expectations about the organization's appetite for ideas. Here is what I mean:
- How will your leadership identify and communicate what types of ideas it wants? There has to be strategic alignment and direction or you will end up with a mess that no one can handle.
- How will your leadership select ideas to move into a development and test phase?
- How will you develop and test ideas to determine their viability? I just wrote about an approach for this in another post.
- How will ideas that tested successfully be selected for full-scale implementation?
- How will those selected ideas be implemented?

Until you have developed even a rudimentary system that adddresses these items, don't start asking for ideas. You risk having a false start that can cost your organization wasted time and effort, and set back your initiative. Creativity is no different than any other business process; you need to engineer the whole end-to-end process, not just jump into the middle.

Hope this helps. I also know of many fine creativity consultants, but I consider that level of capacity-building to be secondary to constructing the overall system (by which I mean even a simple approach to addressing the components I outlined above - it does not have to be complex). I can provide a white paper with a bit more detail if there is interest.

Andy Beaulieu
Results for a Change

quote:

Originally posted by dkim:
Hello,

I have been tasked with providing Creativity Training for a creativity task force that was just formed in our organization. I am looking for a dymnamic trainer that could provide on-site training about imagination, creativity, mind mapping, idea generation, etc.

We are located in the Philadelphia area-any suggestions?

Dear dkim:
I am interested in what you found out. I also have been tasked with identifying training that will foster creativity in the workplace.

dkim -
I think I get what you're trying to do. Giving a talented team a few tools and new ways of thinking can help enhance their natural creative abilities and often generate breakthrough thinking.

I’ve used Progress Assocaites two companies ago – Daniel Leete and Linda McLyman are the owners. I’d highly recommend them – you can tell them I referred you.

Also, here’s a popular post I wrote on my blog, "10 Tips for Creative Thinking" you might enjoy.

Good luck!