Innovators are invited a preview a new website dedicated to offering world-class innovation training workshops, seminars and certifications.
Click HERE to explore the website:
www.InnovationTrainingWorkshops.com
Check out the calendar of new dates for the popular Accelerated Innovation Workshops and Innovation Trainer Certifications. New training workshops and tools will be added every week!
Innovators seeking unique opportunities to learn at workshops, webinars, conferences, certifications and experiences should check out our new calendar by clicking HERE.
The innovation calendar has been updated. Discover new dates for leading-edge conferences, training workshops & seminars, plus convenient, low-cost webinars such as Facilitate-to-Innovate, Questionate-to-Innovate & Decorate-to-Innovate. Check out the Accelerate-to-Innovate webinar series and Certifications for innovation trainers, facilitators and coaches.
Click HEREto view the calendar and bookmark the page to review the calendar often as it is updated weekly.
Every innovator should read Anthony Ulwick's book, What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, because he makes it very easy to questionate-to-innovate. SolutionPeople purchased 50 copies of the book and made it required reading before an innovation facilitation for a consumer products company. The facilitation agenda was simple; we used innovative techniques and tools to answer the 46 questions addressed in the book! The facilitation was a huge success as we produced an Idea Bank with thousands of ideas and over 100 useful solutions.
Question Bank
(created from the Table of Contents in Ulwick's Book)
Formulating Innovation Strategy
1. Who Is the Target of Value Creation and How Should It Be Achieved?
2. What Types of Innovation Are Possible?
3. What Growth Options Should Be Considered?
4. Where in the Value Chain Should We Focus to Maximize Value Creation?
5. How Do We Handle Multiple Constituents with Potentially Conflicting Outcomes?
Capture Customer Inputs
6. Why Should Companies Gather Customer Requirements?
7. What Three Issues Plague the Requirements-Gathering Process?
8. What Types of Data Do Companies Commonly Collect from Customers?
9. What Customer Inputs Are Needed to Master the Innovation Process?
10. What Methods Should Companies Use to Obtain the Necessary Information?
11. How Do You Know Which of the Three Types of Inputs You Should Capture?
Identifying Opportunities
12. What Is an Opportunity?
13. What Three Common Mistakes Are Made in Prioritizing Opportunities?
14. How Should Companies Prioritize Opportunities?
15. How Do You Identify Underserved and Overserved Markets?
16. How Dos Value Migrate Over Time?
17. What Implications Does the Outcome-Driven Paradigm Have for Competitive Analysis?
Segmenting the Market
18. What Is the Purpose of Segmentation?
19. How Has the Practice of Segmentation Evolved?
20. Why Are Traditional Segmentation Methods Ineffective for Purposes of Innovation?
21. What Is Different About Outcome-Based Segmentation?
22. How Is Outcome-Based Segmentation Performed?
23. How Does Outcome-Based Segmentation Address Development and Marketing Challenges?
24. How Is Job-Based Segmentation Different, and When Should it Be Used?
Targeting Opportunities for Growth
25. What Is Different About Targeting for Innovation?
26. What Types of Broad-Market Opportunities Are Likely to Be Attractive?
27. What Segment-Specific Targeting Strategies Are Effective?
28. How Does a Targeting Strategy Result in a Unique and Valued Competitive Position?
29. Why Do Companies Fail to Target Key Opportunities?
Positioning Current Products
30. Why Does Messaging Often Fail to Tout a Product's True Value?
31. What Are the Prerequisites for an Effective Messaging Strategy?
32. What Messaging Will Be Most Effective?
33. Should a Company Message Along an Emotional or Functional Dimension?
34. How Does the Sales Force Have Immediate Impact on Revenue Generation?
35. What Is the Advantage of an Outcome-Based brand?
Prioritizing Projects in the Development Pipeline
36. What Issues Do Companies Face When Prioritizing Projects?
37. What Method Is Used to Identify the Winners and the Losers?
38. Which Efforts Should Get Top Priority?
39. What Other Factors Affect Project Prioritization?
Devising Breakthrough Concepts
40. Why Does Traditional Brainstorming Often Fail to Produce Breakthrough Ideas?
41. How Are Breakthrough Concepts Successfully Generated?
42. What Are the Mechanics Behind Focused Brainstorming?
43. Why Do Traditional Concept-Evaluation Methods Fail?
44. How Is the Customer Scorecard Used to Evaluate Product and Service Concepts?
45. How Are These Methods Applied in Practice?
46. What Is the Role of R&D in the Innovation Process?
Order Anthony Ulwick's book, What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services via Amazon.com
"If you want to think outside of the box, you should not put brains in a box," states SolutionPeople's Gerald Haman, who first created their Chicago innovation center in 1992. Since then, over 10,000 people have experienced the "unbox-like" Thinkubator in Chicago's west loop. Guests are encouraged to share feedback and rate their favorite resources. 
Here are 8 of people's most memorable Thinkubator experiences:
1. Oxygenate-to-Invigorate: Relaxing while breathing pure oxygen at the Oxygen Bar
2. Karaoke-ate-to-Collaborate: Singing from a collection of thousands of Karaoke tunes
3. DISCOvate-to-Celebrate: Celebrating results while dancing with real the Disco lights turned on
4. Blue Sky Brainstorming while inspired by the Thinkubator's skyline views and rooftop decks
5. Exploring the Albert Einstein and John Travolta-themed areas
6. Sitting on the thought-provoking furniture and art from world-famous designers
7. Playing with the creative brain games and gadgets
8. Tasting the fine cuisine from the award-winning restaurants within walking distance of the Thinkubator
Use these links to take a virtual Thinkubator
Tour and review partial list of Thinkubator Resources.
If you want to learn how to design your own innovation center or creative space, enroll in a Decorate-to-Innovate webinar or schedule a team planning facilitation at the Thinkubator.
"If you want people to think outside of the box, don't put their brains in a box," states Gerald "Solutionman" Haman. However, most people meet in traditional box-like conference rooms and hotel ballrooms. Haman has helped many organizations design spaces or facilities that inspire innovation and creativity. Since 1992, his Thinkubator in Chicago has inspired thousands of people to think outside of the box.
While facilitating innovative design sessions for Hermann Miller, Capital One, the Singapore Quality Centre and several conference centers, Solutionman developed Question Banks of over 1,000 provocative space design questions. The "Space Design Question Banks" helped architects, interior designers, facilities managers, and customers "collaborate to decorate to innovate" while reducing costs. Do you want to start designing your own creative space? Here are some questions to begin creating your dream environment.
8 Questions to Help You Decorate-to-Innovate
1. Where do people do their best thinking?
2. How do/does environment and space impact creativity and innovation?
3. Where are people when they think of their most creative and innovative ideas?
4. Who works in environments or spaces that inspire creativity and innovation?
5. What characteristics, elements or resources from other people's environments might be applied in your spaces?
6. What might be changed or improved in the current environments and spaces to inspire more creativity and innovation?
7. How would you describe the ideal personal environment that might inspire you to be highly creative or innovative?
8. How would people describe the ideal environment that inspires collaboration and teamwork to produce more creativity and innovation?
Download a pdf of your FREE color posters of the "8 Great Decorate Questions" and "Quotes on Space Design" by clicking HERE. Take the 8x11 inch posters to your next meeting to stimulate some very provocative innovation conversations.
Get more information on the Decorate–to-Innovate™ Method by registering for webinars listed on our Innovation Calendar. Get more information or request to register by clicking HERE to send an email.
In Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, authors Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba explain how to convert customers into influential and enthusiastic evangelists. The book outlines the framework for developing evangelism marketing strategies and programs. The ultimate goal is to create communities of influencers who drive sales or membership for your company or organization. Many companies have been effective at applying the book's "six basic tenets" to create evangelists for innovation and sales growth.
The book explains how IBM, Southwest Airlines, The Dallas Mavericks, and SolutionPeople have successfully built their customer base and created targeted marketing programs to involve their biggest fans. These programs have produced legions of unofficial salespeople and a cost-effective and powerful marketing force. McConnell & Huba interviewed SolutionPeople's Gerald Haman, clients, and spent several days at the Thinkubator, and wrote a book chapter entitled The High-Flying Solutionman that chronicles Haman's 20 years of growing his business through customer evangelism.
6 Tenets to Create Customer Evangelists
1. Customer plus-delta: Continuously gather customer feedback.
2. Napsterize knowledge: Share knowledge freely.
3. Build the buzz: Build word-of-mouth networks.
4. Create community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
5. Make bite-size chunks: Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
6. Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or your industry, better.
Download a PDF of the entire chapter from the book on SolutionPeople’s applications of the Six Tenets by clicking HERE.
Order the book from Amazon.com by clicking HERE.
Gerald Haman loves questions. In fact, his favorite question is "What is your favorite question?"
So here was my question. How did he and his company, SolutionPeople, get me to travel half way across the country to attend his Accelerated Innovation & Creativity Workshop in Chicago?
Throughout my years in corporate America, I have experienced learning and training encounters in virtually every shape or form you can think of – leadership, selling, negotiating, public speaking and streaming media. Why was this going to be any different?
In their bestselling book, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore ask a series of great questions. In a world where most products and services have little differentiation, what would customers really value? Better yet, for what would they pay a premium?
The answer is experiences—how companies engage customers in an inherently personal and memorable way. The buzz on Haman's Accelerated Innovation Workshop was that it wasn't the traditional lecture and 3-ring binder snore, but a real EXPERIENCE.
This was a big lure for me. I had just became was certified by Pine & Gilmore in the theories and models of The Experience Economy. I wanted to discover if the Thinkubator "experience" lived up to its impressive word-of-mouth billing.
Located in a spacious loft in Chicago's West Loop, the Thinkubator is a truly innovative venue. Festooned with toys, games, large-screen TVs, Aeron chairs, light bulbs in various shapes and forms, bean bags, sofas and sculptures, it invites you into a world that definitely isn't business as usual.
Haman's opening act is literally transforming. It's called the "Know Your Brain Game Experience." It's a quick, but amazingly accurate "brain scan." I won't spoil the surprise, but attendees gain some insight into how their brain works and how they can use this knowledge to become more consistently innovative. The game is a highly interactive experience and sets the stage for the introduction of SolutionPeople's 4-quadrant brain model and 4-state Accelerated Innovation Process. (Investigate, Create, Evaluate and Activate). At this point, every participant gets a KnowBrainer® Innovation & Creativity tool. The brainchild of Haman, it's an innovative hand-held tool that uses a combination of questions, words, quotes and images to help people think through all the stages of his proven creative problem solving process.
Cool fact: Tests by students at Northwestern University and Wayne State University found that the KnowBrainer tool increased creativity levels by over 500% versus traditional brainstorming with flip charts. In just the first 3 hours of the Innovation Workshop, SolutionPeople delivered a memorable experience – engaging clients with entertainment, education and a dynamic venue.
A great experience? Most definitely. One of the most remarkable accomplishments of SolutionPeople is that the "experience" has fueled the growth of the organization. Haman hasn't relied on traditional advertising to get clients; growth was a result of word of mouth and the continuing story amazing Thinkubator experiences.
Author's Footnote: SolutionPeople's Gerald Haman recently invested an entire week with Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore to become a Certified Experience Economy Expert. He is already making plans to enhance the Thinkubator Experience by applying new ideas inspired by his interaction and discussions with Pine & Gilmore. Haman has organized a new LinkedIn Experience Economy Networking Group for fans and practitioners of The Experience Economy.
Do you need breakthrough solutions and more innovation? Do you need to improve your innovation skills? Do you want to generate more and better ideas in less time? Do you wish you had more time-saving tools and techniques? Do you need a better ROI in these challenging economic times?
If you answered yes, you and your team should experience SolutionPeople's upcoming Innovation Training Workshops led by Gerald "Solutionman" Haman in at the Thinkubator in Chicago or onsite at client locations.
Investments Create Dividends: Earn a Guaranteed ROI (Return On Ideas)
The award-winning workshop is designed to help you and your people develop ideas and action plans to address your real-world goals, challenges and problems. SolutionPeople guarantees participants will leave the training with ideas worth more than their tuition investment.
Solutionman's Personal Video
of Workshop ROI Guarantee 
Click to View ROI Video
A survey of over 1,000 graduates revealed that 80% of them generated ideas valued at over $50,000 from the Accelerated Innovation Training. One team of 25 people yielded solutions valued at over $273 million. Another team developed a product that was recognized by BusinessWeek as one of the Most Innovative Products of the Year. If you do not feel you have gained at least $1,000 worth of value, you can ask for a refund or take the course again. SolutionPeople is confident you will generate ideas worth much more.
Innovation Workshop Highlights
Learning Objectives
Investments & ROI
Agenda
Tools & Resources
Thinkubator
Trainer: Solutionman
Recognition & Support
Expert Recommendations
Customer Testimonials
Registration Options
Collaborate to Innovate: Bring Innovation Teams
Bring a team and leave as an innovation dream team. Learn how to "collaborate-to-innovate" and save 20% to 40%.
Investment for 2-day Workshop in Chicago on February 16-17 or on March 30-31, 2009.
Register online at www.solutionpeople.com/store or phone 312-829-2852 ext. 14. Download a detailed brochure of the workshop by clicking HERE.
