How are you ensuring that your team members are building the skills they need to innovate? As you begin planning for 2011, consider how you’ll help your team of innovators accomplish their goals.
Take some time to map out your innovation objectives and challenges. What skills does your team need to learn? What companies can your team learn from? What are the challenges they need to overcome? Once you’ve delved into some of these important questions, you’ll have an idea of what you need to accomplish over the next year.
You can then outline how to make it happen. If your team is too inwardly-focused, what external best practices and innovations would you like everyone to know about and learn from? If your team struggles with bringing ideas to launch, they’ll need to learn how to better screen ideas and build out concepts.
Work with your learning and development departments to make the courses happen. You can facilitate the training course yourself, or turn to outside experts, but either way, build “learning” time into your plans for the next year. There’s nothing like a refresher course on creative problem solving to reignite stale innovation efforts and invigorate your team.
Posted by Jenny Wang 
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