INNOVATION & CREATIVITY BLOG
Orchestrating Team Performance | 4 Week Workshop Starting May 7, 2020 11:00 – 12:00 EST May 7, 14, 21 & 28, 2020
Description 4 Week Workshop Starting May 7, 2020 11:00 - 12:00 EST May 7, 14, 21 & 28, 2020 Tools and training for leaders who want to build powerful teams. Unlock Capability | End Confusion | Get More Done Webinar $360 USD In 1-hour a week over 4 weeks, we'll...
Think Outside the Box Wed, April 22, 2020 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT
Description Get tools and training to lead yourself and others to new ways of thinking Embrace Diversity | Enhance Effectiveness | Maximize Results Feeling boxed in by your thinking and looking for a way out? Curious about what doesn't feel right? What bugs you that...
Building Your Innovative Team – February 10, 2020 in Surrey, BC 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Building Your Innovative Team – February 10, 2020 in Surrey, BC 11:00 am – 1:00 pm Click here to Register Pricing Date,Time and Location FREE! Monday February 10, 2020 HealthTech Innovation HUB 201-13737 96th Avenue Surrey, British Columbia V3V 0C6 View Map What...
Think Outside the Box – Toronto – Saturday January 18, 2020
Think Outside the Box – January 18, 2020 in Toronto There’s a little-known secret to thinking outside the box. It’s knowing how, when faced with a challenge, you engage in the universal creative process. Every one of us has unique thinking preferences for moving...
The Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop – Toronto – February 20, 2020 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
The Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop! – February 20, 2020 in Toronto 9:30 am – 12:30 pm In every business, there’s always a dilemma that needs a better solution. These are the solutions that benefit from creative thinking. The challenge is, for the most part,...
The Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop! – February 21, 2020 in Ottawa – Kanata 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
The Ultimate Creative Thinking Workshop! – February 21, 2020 in Ottawa – Kanata 10:00 am – 1:00 pm In every business, there’s always a dilemma that needs a better solution. These are the solutions that benefit from creative thinking. The challenge is, for the...
Innov8rs vs the Organization Thursday December 12, 2019
Free Webinar Innovators vs. the Organization: A New Study on Cognitive Differences That Make Innovation Hard Trending Topic Talk and Q&A with Sarah Thurber & Janice Francisco Thursday December 12, 2019 13:00 – 14:00 EST Innovators love wild ideas....
ALL ABOUT INSPIRATION TORONTO, NOVEMBER 22, 2019
Call it Creative Problem Solving, Integrative Thinking or Epiphanies, it's ALL ABOUT INSPIRATION Host Dave Boyle will lead a panel of experts as they discuss how to get more inspiration to tackle complex challenges. Panel Members: Amanda Small, Director of People...
I work on an Innovation Team
You’ve been asked to work on an innovation team with a diverse group of people. They’ve been hand-picked from across the organization and you’ve likely not worked with any of them before. Your work is split off from the core business and it’s not what you’ve been...
My team is facing Change, Uncertainty, and Constraints
You’ve been asked to lead change in your organization and you’re concerned about your team. You’re feeling pressured to deliver more value to the organization, and what you’ve done in the past might not serve you as well in the future. You and your team have been...
I work on a Distributed, Dispersed or Virtual Team
Call it what you want-- distributed, dispersed or virtual--these kinds of teams are made up of individuals who are geographically dispersed, work across time, space, organizational boundaries and rely on communication and technology to get things done. Team members...
I work on a Technology Team
You’re being asked to create value and deliver innovation. Your team is excited about the possibilities of new technologies, but when you bring a solution to the organization, you get a whole bunch of grief. You’re doing your best to follow sound project management...
I work on an Engineering or Product Development Team
You’re finding that more and more of your success is dependent on your ability to work across functions. And it’s painful. Everyone looks at the problem you’re tackling from a different perspective and few people see the value of looking beyond next quarter’s results....
I work on an R&D Team
Your team has been asked to lead or contribute innovation, and research and develop new products and opportunities critical to the success of the organization. But you’re finding more and more of your success is dependent upon your ability to work across functions....
I work on a Project Team
Your project is expected to deliver change to the organization. You’re doing your best to follow sound project management principles but your efforts at working across functions are frustrating. Getting stakeholders involved and interested in doing the work needed to...
I work on an Operations Team
Your team does pretty well the same things every day, but you’re being asked to think creatively, be more innovative, and find new and better ways of doing your work. Cost savings and avoidance, continuous improvement to drive efficiency, effectiveness and deliver...
I work on a Leadership Team / I’m helping to develop leaders
Creativity has been identified as a key leadership competency, and many organizations have identified innovation as a priority. Creativity and innovation are strongly linked because without creative thinking skills, you can’t drive the novelty necessary for...
THE ULTIMATE CREATIVE THINKING WORKSHOP!
This creative thinking workshop will help you harness your creativity to find innovative solutions to business challenges. Every business focuses on solving problems for clients, but we also need new solutions within our own businesses. What Strategic Challenge Do You...
How to Facilitate Effective Meetings
In this blog post we examine various aspects of how to facilitate effective meetings. It’s a topic clients ask us about a lot. But why? Why Worry about Effective Meetings? Given trends around the future of work and an increasing need for innovation in...
What Kind of Organizational Culture Supports Innovation?
The kind of organizational culture that supports innovation is a “culture of innovation.” What are the defining features of a culture of innovation? At BridgePoint Effect we define it as: An environment that has the agility to respond to change and provides the...
How to Bring Innovation to a Company
The question of how to bring innovation to a company is certainly something I spend a lot of time exploring through research and with clients. With our partner FourSight, we sponsored the Innov8rs Conference for intrapreneurs, conducted global research to answer the...
Answering the Challenge of How to Measure Innovation
In this article I focus on firm-level metrics, that is, how organizations measure innovation. If you’re interested in how to measure innovation at the country level, please see our blog about the Global Innovation Index. In a business world accustomed to having easy...
Innovators: Here’s What We Know About You (So Far)
This article was originally published on the Innov8rs blog, October 14, 2018. The research focused on in this article will be released at the Innov8rs Miami conference, February 20-21, 2019. What makes an innovator an innovator? Why is it that some people just can’t...
How to Be an Innovator: Four Actions You Can Take Now
A common misconception about innovation is that it’s all about technology; it’s not. So, if your job doesn’t have you occupied with developing or implementing the latest and greatest in bleeding edge technology, or if you’re in a job that’s operational in...
How to Facilitate a Meeting
In the spirit of Hallowe’en, we’re poking fun at scary meetings. As an extra treat, we’re sharing some tricks of the trade on how to facilitate a meeting that drives greater value from the time you ask people to spend in meetings. Here’s to hoping that the...
How to Be Innovative at Work
As an adult educator and organizational development/change consultant with a Master’s of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership, I’m fascinated by how people in organizations learn to be more innovative. Indeed, much of my work over the past twenty years has...
Why Is Innovation Important for Society?
This Thanksgiving, I'm travelling to work on an innovation project with the Israeli government. (For readers outside of Canada, Thanksgiving Day is the first Monday of October.) As I'm landing in Tel Aviv, the Thanksgiving turkey, mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie...
How to Develop Innovation Skills
By Janice Francisco, CEO, Principal Innovation Consultant, Facilitator and Coach, BridgePoint Effect, and Chair and Advisor to the Conference Board of Canada’s Council on Commercialization and Innovation At the end of August, I was invited to Ottawa, Canada to help...
How to Develop a Culture of Innovation
By Janice Francisco, CEO, Principal Innovation Consultant, Facilitator and Coach, BridgePoint Effect Given that innovation is a leading indicator of an organization’s ability to sustain success, it’s understandable why so many organizations are focused on how to...
How to Develop Innovative Ideas
By Janice Francisco, CEO, Principal Innovation Consultant, Facilitator and Coach, BridgePoint Effect Funny thing about ideas: within organizations, there seems to be a large interest in asking for ideas and little thought put into how to develop innovative ideas. This...
How to Develop an Innovation Strategy
If your organization is struggling with how to develop an innovation strategy, know that you aren’t alone. Leaders in most organizations typically agree that innovation is a good idea, so they set innovation as a key organizational strategy and then neglect to define...
What Is the Global Innovation Index?
This week, on July 10, the 2018 Global Innovation Index was released. You may ask, “What is the Global Innovation Index?” The Global Innovation Index (GII) report is a leading indicator of a country’s ability to innovate, and is based on the premise that innovation is...
Why Innovation Is Necessary
The Conference Board of Canada defines innovation as a process through which economic or social value is extracted from knowledge—by creating, diffusing, and transforming ideas—to produce new or improved products, services and processes. In short, a key reason as to...
How to Facilitate a Community Meeting
Community meetings are often held to engage community members, hear more voices and get more viewpoints. The question is, how to facilitate a community meeting so that these goals are achieved? What Is a Community? Before we answer that question, let’s step back and...
How to Think Creatively and Innovatively
Guest post by the Innov8rs Team. How to Think Creatively and Innovatively was originally published as The Innovative Team: Recognizing and Developing Your Innovators on the Innov8rs blog. Creativity is in high demand. According to studies done by Adobe and IBM, 94% of...
How to Be a Good Meeting Facilitator
When we think about how to be a good meeting facilitator, we often focus on the time that we are in the meeting itself. However, the job of a good meeting facilitator starts well before meeting time and lasts long after it ends. Good meeting facilitators endeavour to...
How to Create Innovative Ideas
Have you noticed – there’s a lot of interest in having “innovative Ideas” in our workplaces. Many people wonder about how to create innovative ideas, or worry if their ideas are “innovative enough.” What many don’t realize is that creativity is very important to the...
How to Develop Creativity and Innovation: Dedicate One Day
World Creativity and Innovation Week (WCIW) April 15 – 21 and World Creativity and Innovation Day, April 21 (WCID) advocates solving problems in new ways an annual event. The overall purpose is to free up, encourage and remind people to use their creativity...
How to Generate Innovative Ideas
How to Generate Innovative Ideas: Guest post by Helen Cahen When I work with a team on the question of how to generate innovative ideas, I often ask team members, “Are you creative?” Depending upon the group, I usually get between one and four hands raised. I once...
Acknowledging Inconvenient Truths
Guest post by Dr. Brett Richards, Founder and President of Connective Intelligence, and author of Grow Through Disruption: Breakthrough Mindsets to Innovate, Change and Win with the O.G.I. The goal of organizations and the goals of innovation are most often the...
How to Become an Innovative Company
How to become an innovative company is all about powering people to innovate. By situating your organization on the innovation map, equipping your team with the creativity and innovation skills they need, and giving them real-world practice on solving a problem for...
How Does Innovation Increase Productivity?
This past week in New York City, my colleague Helene Cahen and I had the honour of attending a joint meeting of the Conference Board of US Innovation Leadership Council and the Conference Board of Canada Council of Innovation and Commercialization, of which I am the...
How to Encourage Innovation in a Team
How to Encourage Innovation in a Team, by Janice Francisco I’ve been working with a team over the past eighteen months that had volunteered to address challenges management in the client organization saw on the horizon. These challenges had resulted from recent and...
Go Take a Risk: How to Conduct an Experiment in Risk Taking and Innovation
Imagine a senior leadership team telling their entire department to “go take a risk.” Ginny Santos and I recently completed a four-month engagement with a client who told their department exactly that. Last summer, we got the call. Our client was looking for a way to...
Taking the Risk on Innovation: The Video
As we’ve had a number of inquiries about our Taking the Risk Out of Innovation course, we made a short video that shows the course content and experience, and we filmed the video from a participant’s point of view. Taking the Risk on Innovation is a highly...
Reading for Creativity
78% of college-educated workers over 25 wish they had more creative ability. 94% of hiring managers consider creativity when hiring job candidates. Creative applicants are preferred, 5-to-1. CEOs identify creativity as the #1 leadership quality needed for...
The Innovation Skills You and Your Team Need
Innovation Skills for Your Team When I was completing my Masters of Science in Creativity and Change Leadership, we had to take a course in Scientific Measures. This course was designed to help us assess the reliability and validity of scientific research; we were,...
The Trouble with Canada’s Innovation Policy
In October 2017, in my capacity as Chair to the Conference Board of Canada Council on Innovation and Commercialization, I participated in a Council meeting held in Montreal. During this meeting we examined how innovation performance is measured in Canada and how...
An Innovation Christmas Carol
"Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be only?" - Scrooge to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) We had a...
Managing and Measuring Innovation: Improving Canada’s Innovation Outcomes
Canada is innovation challenged. According to the 2015 Conference Board Report How Canada Performs, Canada gets a “C” grade and ranks ninth out of sixteen peer countries on innovation performance. I currently have the honour of chairing the Conference Board of...
Three Ways Your Organization Can Do Innovation Better
Attending the Intrapreneurship Conference in Toronto a few weeks back reinforced some of my beliefs around how organizations can improve the way they “do” innovation. As we know, intrapreneurs are integral to innovation, and so the following three themes about how...
Intrapreneurship and Innovation are All About Change, and the Job of a Change Leader is Never Easy
As I mentioned in my last blog post, earlier in November I spent three days at the Intrapreneurship Conference in Toronto. The line-up of speakers on Day One included CEOs Larry Keeley of Doblin Group (Deloitte), Idris Mootee of Idea Couture, my colleague Ken Tencer...
Intrapreneurship and Why it’s Essential for Innovation
You may or may not be familiar with the term “intrapreneurship.” If you are, congratulations! If you aren’t—and especially if you work in an organization that isn’t a start-up—then it’s time to get up to speed or risk being left behind. Last week I spent three days at...
IT Leadership Development with the FourSight Thinking System™: A Case Study
“[FourSight is] a great tool for driving change where you need people to collaborate and get comfortable with the change—they become part of the solution.” BridgePoint Effect has been working with a national Information Technology organization since 2015. Last week...
How to Wire Your Organization’s DNA for Innovation
Would you say your organization is innovative? Maybe? Or maybe not. What if I asked the question this way: Would you say that innovation and being more innovative are part of your organization’s strategy? Now that your head is nodding “Yes,” I’ll ask one more...
Is Collaboration Dressed Up as Consensus in Your Organization?
Do you find collaboration when innovating a bit scary? Are you haunted by consensus decision-making? Let me bring you some hope. As I’ve often said, innovation is a team sport. And like any sport, there are rules to follow and everyone has a role to play. Otherwise,...
Playing with Fire: Innovation is Risky Business
What might it have been like to be the person who discovered fire, arguably one of the greatest innovations in our human history? My bet is, the idea was greeted pretty much in the same way most new ideas are. With skepticism. Imagine if you will: Perhaps fire...
Why reflecting on progress is key to a culture of innovation
In her book, The Progress Principle, creativity and innovation researcher Teresa Amabile shares the following: A sense of making progress on meaningful work was the single most important factor in igniting creativity, satisfaction, and productivity among employees—far...
Making the Commitment to Risk and Learn from Failure in Innovation
On Friday September 29, BridgePoint Effect ran a special event in Ottawa that introduced our course Taking the risk on Innovation with leaders from the private, federal government and non-profit sectors. They were brave souls willing to engage in reflective...
An immersion experience in the Silicon Valley: A tale of two cultures
One of the highlights I experienced in 2015 occurred when my colleague and friend Helene Cahen and I had the chance to share an immersion experience in the Silicon Valley. The visit was organized by the Conference Board of Canada and brought together a group of...
Working with the “argyle profile” and facing team challenges
Often, people who have different cognitive profiles find the differences too hard to cope with. The team fails to achieve peak performance because they find it “impossible” to collaborate, using the argument that other team members “don’t get it”. Conflict can be valuable and can allow a team to achieve full potential, the FourSight™ assessment can help people understand how to make diversity an asset.
Sarah Thurber, the Managing Partner at FourSight™, recently wrote a newsletter article about how diversity on teams can actually be a benefit to team performance. She explained this by sharing the experience of two oppositely profiled executives on a team who recently went through a FourSight™ Assessment debrief.
Take Your Team from Lagging to Thriving
Imagine how great it would feel if you realized one day that your team was solving problems and getting so much more done without you having to be directly involved.
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