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Innovative Thinking Workshops and Presentations
Ed Bernacki created The Idea Factory in 1996 to help people and organizations develop their potential to innovate.
He is now the innovation learning partner for the Canadian Centre for Management Development (CCMD). He was also employed in the public sector while in New Zealand, where he spent two years with NZ Post after receiving his Executive MBA. He has worked with a wide variety of Canadian Government Departments, including groups within Industry Canada, Health Canada, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Ministry of Natural Resources, Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC) and numerous others. He has also spoken at a range of conferences offered by CCMD and various government departments.
Training for Innovative Thinking
The Idea Factory delivers a range of standard and customized innovation workshops for the public sector. All programs are designed to address three key concerns:
- What is innovation in the public sector?
- How do I start to be more innovative?
- Where do I start to be more innovative?
(Download Program Overview)
Introductory and training programs can delivered in a variety of formats:
- Briefings - Executive-level overviews of what it takes to foster greater innovation in a team or department.
- Training workshops - These can range from 45-minute introductions to two-day workshops with on-going refresher workshops and coaching.
- Conference keynote speeches and workshops - Themes include Finding More Ideas at This Conference, How to Find More and Bigger Ideas that Count, and Managing for Greater Innovation.
- Innovation strategies - If innovation is so important, why do so few groups have a plan in place to foster innovation? A simple and concise strategy would encompass the key decisions necessary to create the right conditions for innovative thinking. Key components include setting objectives, communicating for innovation, identifying specific projects, training for innovation, and useful measures of results.
Conference or Retreat Planning
Ed Bernacki has worked with organizations to help shape more innovative conferences. Whether or not the overall theme is innovation, he works to involve participants in ways that lead to results that go beyond learning. Whether there are 10, 50 or 200 participants, this creates a tremendous resource that can be harnessed to focus on a specific challenge or problem. The key is to produce a quality learning plan along with a plan for logistics. He can also provide the content for events that focus on innovation and creativity.
Link to "Helping You to Make Your Conferences More Innovative"
Team Building Days
The skills for managing ideas can also be taught and practiced in ways that lead to a new understanding of the concepts. How? By requiring that participants use these skills in a fun setting through the Big ACME Toy Company simulation. Participants will be challenged to create a totally original toy concept, develop it, judge it, and the present for evaluation. Throughout this process, all participants learn to use the key skills for finding more powerful ideas that solve tough challenges.
Download Big ACME Toy Company pdf file
Personal Innovation Profiles
Don't be fooled by any tools that claim to measure the degree of someone's creativity. There is no such measure. What we can measure is how people are creative - their style for approaching problems and challenges. Everyone is capable of finding new ideas but we each have our own style for doing so. A key to building teams is to provide an understanding of these different styles, the strengths and weaknesses of each, and how people can work together, recognizing these different styles. This understanding provides a common language and perspective, so that people can respect each other's contributions.
Organizational Innovation Audits
Innovation audits can pinpoint the areas where more focus is needed to enhance the potential for innovation. For background on innovation audits, see www.waveglobal.com and contact The Idea Factory.
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innovation