Companies & Enterprises
You want to drive innovation and digitalization, withstand your competitors and young start-up companies? My team and I help your organization steer ideas and solutions into profitable channels in order to accomplish new objectives via new paths.
Some of the best and award-winning innovation programs within enterprises and medium-sized companies were developed and implemented by Dr. Ute Hillmer. Her experience in global corporations, medium-size businesses as well as in her own start-ups, generates understanding and acceptance.
Innovation Offers
Every company has special innovation challenges and yet many things are the same. Based on decades of experience, we build the right innovation program for your company. More than often, the following components fit:
> Innovation Trial Day (4-8h)
Make your employees curious about fast actionable innovation through an impulse of lean innovations. This is not for those who want to slow down the hunger for digital transformation.
Up to 80 employees work in small teams with lean innovation methods and build initial innovation ideas. An innovation festival for the brave and for those who want to be brave.
> Innovation Sprint I (3 Days)
Discover the innovation potential of your employees and spark enthusiasm for fast, targeted innovation. Up to 40 employees learn new Lean Innovation methods for specific customer challenges and implement them directly.
2-5 people per team explore the customer perspective in pre-defined or self-selected problem areas and develop new solutions from gained customer knowledge. After a pitch, the management decides whether the topic will be pursued or not. It’s all about finding a broad spectrum of relevant innovation topics and identifying first promising ideas.
> Innovation Sprint II (5 Days)
The second sprint phase creates a deeper understanding of the customer and tests draft prototypes with customers. The participants perspective of the unutterably broad spectrum of approaches expands and teams grow together into functioning units.
In the second sprint phase, gained customer knowledge is verified and various expert perspectives are examined in order to prioritize an approach. Teams conduct in-depth customer and expert interviews, sharpen target markets, and build draft prototypes and business models to test with potential customers. Team cohesion and team communication are sharpened.
> Innovation Intensive (6-9 Months with 10-15 Coaching days)
After a successful sprint phase, there is the possibility to develop the innovation in a 6-12 month program. We support you with 10-15 days of intensive supervision from different experts. In between the coaching days are the working phases for the teams. The teams create first functional prototypes and acquire test customers. Team members work part time on the project.
While the Sprint focuses on many alternative innovation approaches, the intensive phase systematically deepens a solution approach. In addition to the desirability in the market, we also test various business models and their profitability, as well as technical feasibility. First pilot customers are won and market maturity is sought.
> Innovation Grow (individual)
Innovations have different marketing constitutions to established products. When it comes to innovation, the human psyche follows a pattern that can be used.
No matter how fast communication channels change, the pattern remains. We train together how to use this pattern optimally and guide you there, wherever you need it, with a broad network of experts
> Train-the-Trainer (6 days, then individual)
You are an innovation manager and also know one innovation method or the other? But how does it turn into a successful innovation program with inspiring workshops?
Together we develop a first innovation test program for your company and carry out the first sprint as a 3-day workshop. You are the co-trainer and are there to learn, learn, learn. After the first Sprint I workshop we have all learned a lot. You in particular have learned a lot about the semantics of the workshop, about team motivation and team discipline. I have learned how the innovation DNA of your company lives and how the workshop for this DNA can be improved. Potentially we’ll do a second workshop together for further learnings or you take the leap and jump into the water and swim. The lifebuoy is a phone call away.
> Innovation Keynote (30-90 Min)
The topic of innovation is initiated in an exciting, energetic presentation and the urgency for change is created.
The impulse creates curiosity and hunger for more, and often results in pulsating discussions
> In all cases…
together we yield new impulses and methods in your company. You change working cultures step by step, you give front runners the freedom to start new ideas in a concrete project, and allow those that are hesitant, the peace and quiet of onlookers, to familiarize themselves with the successes of the new methods without the burden of change.
„New innovation methods are learned the fastest by participating„
Lean innovation is based on a few, clear principles, yet there are many different methods in which to implement these principles. In many programs, complex sequences are taught in a disciplined way to make trainers indispensable. With us, you train the methods on your innovation topics, in a comprehensible and repeatable way. Innovation to “touch and experience“.
Find, develop and sustain successful teams
The right team mixture ensures creativity and result orientation, but also the necessary depth of detail and the right working atmosphere. You can assemble such teams!
Existing teams become high-performance teams when strengths are cultivated and weaknesses in processes and attention are tackled. As you expand teams, you can make valuable additions to the skill sets that will benefit all team members and enhance team performance.
Structural change can be achieved relatively easily. Cultural change only succeeds if convictions and values change.
You need a new innovation culture?
Live customer proximity day after day. Create innovations for which there is a market. Learn to think from the customer’s point of view.
If you understand the world of your customers in detail, if you know what tasks your customers are struggling with day by day, then you will build innovations that provide added value where it matters most. Think and act customer-centered. That’s how you get your customers excited.
We take your teams away from the desk, out into the world of customers. There they experience customer proximity and customer understanding first hand. In doing so, your teams work independently and learn to appreciate their work. At the same time executives experience how “letting go” releases positive forces among the participants.
With a keynote or a daily event, we first create a sense of urgency. With one or two selected innovation projects, we develop a tailor-made innovation program “in its concrete implementation”, with measurable, presentable results. With this we prove to all procrastinators that innovation is a successful way into the future.
The innovation process in detail
Marketing innovations
The success of your innovation is dependent on success with pragmatic to conservative customers, because they are the big market. They vigorously weigh their benefits with costs incurred and the conversion pain. In order to be most successful, you have to understand these customers down to the smallest detail.
And customers are not all the same. There are the visionaries, that are early adopters with big plans and goals. And the dabblers and hobbyists who can help you to begin with. They all have to be picked up at the right time and with the right messages in order to win in a market.
My passion for your success
Let me help you get your InnoTeams out of their comfort zone and into the real world of understanding customer frustrations and needs. Let me help you create real problem insight in these changeable times. Let’s develop innovation for which there is an actual market. How? We take the mere chance out of your innovation process and achieve understanding – customer understanding. Building innovation that is intended from a customer point of view and offers a real value.
