IDEA-Lab

Boosting Innovation, Business and Economic Growth within BC

 

What participation in the IDEA-Lab will do for your business?

Innovation + Diversity + Enrichment + Action will supercharge and modernize the

capability of your business to innovate and grow.

 

How it works

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• The senior leadership team nominates an employee with leadership aspirations and potential to participate in the IDEA-Lab so they can learn and immediately apply Challenge-Driven Innovation (CDI). CDI enables a business to prioritize its most significant challenges to and opportunities for accelerated growth and take rapid, productive action to overcome the former and make the most of the latter.

• The employee, who will become your organization's Innovation Champion (IC), will attend five 3.5 hours online workshops over the course of twelve weeks. The IC will learn and simultaneously lead the use within the business of the CDI method to accelerate innovation and company growth. The IDEA-Lab is learning by doing.

• ICs and the business will be provided with the Planbox CDI software, with processes, business rules, workflows and tools that form a diversity-based, crowdsourced innovation methodology. Planbox, a Canadian product, is recognized by Forrester as the top-ranking innovation management platform in the global marketplace.

• Participation in the IDEA-Lab is contingent upon the business having challenges or opportunities that have the potential to create at least $50,000 p.a. of savings, additional revenue or other value once addressed satisfactorily. This entrance requirement ensures that your business can gain a minimum 10x return on its investment in participation in the IDEA-Lab.

• The IDEA-Lab includes methods for leveraging diversity to increase and improve creative thinking and innovation, making it an additional element of any diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative you may have.

 

Benefits of Participation

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• Challenge-Driven Innovation can be learned and implemented quickly; it is also extremely versatile. CDI will add value and growth to your business repeatedly in a wide variety of business situations including developing new, winning product and services, process improvement, digital transformation, fixing complex supply-chain problems, developing new and innovative business models, radically improving the customer’s experience, meeting net-zero targets and more. Each time you use CDI your Innovation Champion will be leading the creation of significant new value, or substantially reduce costs.

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• The IDEA-Lab is in-effect also a Leadership Succession Process, enabling the evaluation of the IC's leadership capabilities in concrete business situations. It is also a great way to demonstrate the firm's commitment to the IC's personal growth and development, increasing the prospect of retaining them in a very competitive market for talent. Whichever growth-strategy your business is pursuing - market penetration, product development, diversification or other - it requires effective innovation to succeed.