Innovation Coach Training

Goal-setting is an important step before any major journey. Defining effective goals allows you and your team to make progress and then measure it. This workshop covers program goal-setting, and how to use these techniques to create a dashboard to keep your innovation project on track.

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.

Getting started with rapid experimentation can be daunting, but a few simple tricks will help even advanced practitioners focus on their critical risks. The simpler the experiments are, the faster they are to run and gather valuable data.

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.

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.

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.

Creating a compelling product or service for the customer starts with a compelling value proposition. If a customer can't understand what's being sold, they won't buy it. In this module, we learn about the different tasks involved in creating a value proposition design.

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.

Using a topic of your choosing, you will construct exercises to demonstrate effective teaching towards an objective and key result. Participants will learn to design an in-person exercise for a new topic, a verbal-only exercise for a new topic, and a facilitation guide.

How can startup culture be maintained when growing the company? How can existing companies bring startup culture into their teams? Maintaining an innovative culture is a competitive advantage. Participants will examine their own work in building an innovation culture and explore how to measure innovation in a larger context.

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.

Surveys are some of the best and worst tools for an innovator. They are great when you can collect valuable quantitative data (such as market size) very quickly. They are terrible because they are very easy to screw up. A bad survey can produce deceptive data, which can lead teams to persevere with a bad idea, or worse, disqualify a great idea.

In this module we discuss the different ways of scaling a business. Participants learn how to build a business around a validated customer segment, how to design experiments around identified channels to determine the most effective way to communicate a value proposition to customers, and how to optimize channels to get the most out of your marketing efforts.