Innovation Coach Training

All innovation projects come with risks, and successful businesses know how to navigate them. This module covers how to brainstorm and prioritize risks with your teams, and clarifies why certain risks are the right thing to focus on at certain stages of a project.

Demographics used to be a marketer’s only tool, but it's insufficient for early-stage customer discovery, and almost useless for designing user experience. Now we use customer personas to generate an intense focus on early adopters and empathy with end users. In this session, we learn how to identify early customers through segmentation and customer personas.

Larger organizations require more stakeholders to close a sale. Understanding the differences between Economic Buyers, Technical Buyers, Evangelists, and Users can turn a longshot into a win. Learn the basics of Value Proposition design, and how to adapt them to the complex sales of a B2B environment.

There is nothing more impactful to your early-stage business model than truly understanding the person you are building for and selling to. This interactive online workshop teaches all you need to know to get out of the building and start talking to your customers. By doing customer discovery, you will understand your customer needs, goals, pains, and aspirations in order to build the right product.

Entrepreneurs are strongly biased towards action to overcome analysis paralysis. But such haste often leads to poorly designed experiments and poorly conducted research, both of which provide confusing or misleading data that leads to bad decisions, or even back to the paralysis of indecision we were trying to avoid.

After identifying a clear business question, we need to identify the right method to gather data that will answer that question. This module helps navigate the dozens of experiment and research methods to find the quickest answers to your business questions.

Every entrepreneur needs to understand how to create a basic financial model of their business. This module teaches you the most important elements to model for the most common business types, and to project how your business will grow based on the relationship between specific customer and product metrics and engines of growth.

Support your customer discovery, landing page, and comprehension test processes with a basic grasp of applicable statistics. You will learn how to recognize false signals in your experiments, determine sample sizes for experiments, calculate margins of error in your results, and understand the impact of population, sample size, and confidence interval. Ultimately you will be able to identify the winning experiment given a variety of test results.

Qualitative data and quantitative data do not exist in opposition. Qualitative data from UXers should not compete with the quantitative data product owners need for their business model. Both are necessary to a complete understanding of where the desirability of the product meets the viability of the business. Storyboarding is a simple way to start integrating both perspectives into a complete picture of how the user experience impacts the business model.

This module goes into the softer side of coaching, with a focus on familiarizing you with facilitation techniques, understanding different team makeups, and learning how to get the most out of your teams. You will practice on tools like our Business Model Canvas to figure out where the team you’re coaching is right now, where you want them to be, and how to get them there.

Managing a series of experiments aimed at discovering a business model is different from managing the execution of a known strategy. The goal in both cases is efficiency, but efficiency-planning changes drastically when you don’t know what the next month holds for your project. This module teaches project management skills aimed at maximizing the time we spend discovering what works and what doesn’t, and how similar companies execute their project management.

Why don't stage gates work? Why doesn't spending more money on R&D lead to more innovation? How can I drag my company into the future? This module dives into how to understand the ROI of innovation, explain it to stakeholders, and make a case for a dedicated innovation budget using metered funding.

Innovation Ecosystems are complex, and they challenge some of the traditional models of R&D and innovation. A holistic view of how culture, people, and processes interact is vital to allow a system to disrupt and reinvent itself. This workshop focuses on how to map out your ecosystem and identify obstacles that are putting the brakes on innovation.