Want to push innovation through the org cracks? One tip: Do it softly.

Alan compares being an innovation ambassador to being in a marriage -- things take patience, time, and a lot of baby steps.

You might not be able to measure initial changes, but you should be able to see them.

In this episode, Alan mentions some examples of changes in behaviors that you can see at the beginning of your transformation initiatives.

"Shoot for the stars, if you fail you might land on the moon." While that's a nice motto, a lot of change initiative tend to be "too big to succeed".

In this episode, Alan talks about small changes that anybody in your organization can make in their small teams to slowly (but surely) change the bigger organization.

"We can't expect our teams to spend that much time on training program X. Can we do a workshop?"

Many innovation leaders we talk to mention time as being one of the main decision criteria when choosing a training solution. The less time their teams spend on learning, the more time they can spend working (and bringing in the $). 

Over the years, training hundreds of busy and high-performing corporate teams we've learned that looking at this from a completely different angle can help leaders see and capture the value of innovation training sooner, and at a lower price.

Type in "Innovation" into your company eLearning interface and you'll get 57,000+ results. 

When innovation leads work with L&D to train their teams in innovation, they're often given access to massive course libraries with thousands of courses on any topic imaginable.

Listen in to hear why course libraries are not the magic solution they're sold as, and why we're not at a point where AI can take over and create the best and most effective learning experience for your teams.

Most Design Thinking workshops fail because they have the wrong goal. 

Leaders expect employees to change the way they work after joining a 1-week workshop, yet research shows that behavioral change lasts just 3.5 days. After that, employees go back to working the way they used to.

But workshops are not all bad. Listen in to learn how to best use workshops in your organization (hint: it's not for transforming the way your people work).

Focusing on your customer and your core competency pays out. Listen to a story of a small tailor shop in Milan that has customers standing in line to be served. 

“The hardest people to serve on this journey are not the cynics, but those that are just indifferent.”

After hearing about this pain point from corporate innovation leaders over and over again, we decided to talk about it. In this episode Alan shares his experience with innovation in large companies, and how targeting the right people can be crucial for successful innovation initiatives.