Innovation Programs
The Opportunity
Over 70% of history’s most transformative innovation came from employees, not entrepreneurs.
Employees are the number one source of innovative growth ideas and the only remaining source of true competitive advantage. Arming them with the skills and tools necessary to innovate on a continual basis is of paramount importance to organizational survival.
Knowing this, our clients want to stay ahead in a world of disruption by increasing the speed of implementation and being able to seize and react to new opportunities- both incremental and potentially industry changing breakthroughs. As a result, our clients have seen an exponential return on investment via a focus on fully levering the collective IQ of their entire workforce for continuous innovation.
Nextworks programs help create the next practices for enterprise innovation based on global inspiration and with a special focus on talent development, leadership, organizational design, and concise, tailored curriculums needed to define a successful corporate innovation strategy.
Our Approach - Building Your Organization’s Innovative Capabilities
Nextworks Strategy (www.nextworksstrategy.com) has designed and delivered hundreds of customized, interactive innovation training-execution programs for mid to large scale enterprises representing multiple industry verticals from Food to Healthcare to Technology.
We take a flexible, adaptable approach to the joint development of innovation training with our clients. Our approach is also less process driven and more focused on interaction and inclusion to maximize employee engagement:
- Understand the Culture and Tailor the CurriculumWorking with your internal team principals, we orchestrate development of a powerful core curriculum including ideation exercises, interactions and post session measurement of results. This includes intake interviews/collaboration with key members of the leadership team to capture their input and determine the final content/sequence of delivery. Typically, the curriculum will evolve around the core innovation concepts of Why, Ideate, Test, Pilot and Scale.
- Pilot ProgramUsing a cross functional representation of the client leadership team/workforce, we take the pilot group through all modules of the client’s proposed innovation experience. The curriculum is then finalized for delivery.
- Train-the-TrainerWith the final curriculum, Nextworks Strategy trains designated company leaders and facilitators using the fully developed Innovation Modules and “certifies” them to carry the program forward.
- Monitor & Measure ResultsNextworks Strategy creates a set of customized “Innovation Metrics” from ideas generated to actual scaled product/service success stories to measure the overall success of the program.
About Us
The Nextworks Strategy team, along with our public innovation & research forum, the Executive Next Practices Institute (ENP Forums) has a Southern California base at the University of California Irvine- UCI Beall Applied Innovation.
Our ENP Forums division (www.enpinstitute.com) has hosted over 330 innovation forums worldwide over the past decade for C-suite enterprise leaders covering “first look” topics ranging from Customer Centricity to Blockchain to Intrapreneurship. These direct collaborations with thousands of enterprise leaders has led to the creation of new ways to enhance organizational innovation efforts and execution.
The concept of developing next practices that are unique to every organization vs traditional benchmarking forces teams to think beyond their domains and their status quo operations to generate new ideas for improvement, growth, customer satisfaction and results.
The Nextworks Strategy team leverages the ENP Forum feedback and latest training methods to help our clients develop their own approach to creating next practices and internal innovation processes.
The Team
Nextworks Strategy is led by Managing Director Scott Hamilton, a former corporate executive who held strategic planning, marketing, organization effectiveness and HR roles with companies such as Nestle, ARAMARK, Golden State Foods, Honeywell, Amerisource Bergen and DirecTV. His executive and organizational coaching expertise includes the implementation of strategic execution programs, advanced innovation methods, leadership team performance sessions and the pioneering use of “collective intelligence” alignment programs. He has worked with leaders at all levels in building their strengths to maximize team commitment, capability, focus and results in both emerging and established businesses.
Our other team experts come from a wide array of corporate, technical, training and innovation organizations. We maintain an alliance with many “on call” innovation thought leaders to bring into strategic planning or innovation launch sessions as needed. Depending on the client project, we also have in-house instructional design, graphic, video and trainers available.