— E x e c u t i v e S e s s i o n —
Better, Faster Innovation
LEADING THE FLEXIBLE ENTERPRISE
August 11-12, 2004 / Hilton Boston Back Bay

Key Benefits & Deliverables

This highly focused executive session offers senior managers the opportunity to join their peers from a cross section of industries, to address one of today’s most critical issues – how to accelerate innovation and increase profitability at a time when resources are highly constrained. This session will not only provide you with a clear understanding of the power of experimentation and flexible development processes in value creation, it will also arm you with current research data, case examples, best practices and practical steps to integrate them into your development process.

Working in facilitated, interactive roundtable discussion groups, you’ll learn what approaches others are taking to battle staff resistance, speed innovation and manage market and technology uncertainties. Through detailed in-depth discussion and analysis, you’ll uncover the strengths and weaknesses of your current R&D/product development processes and develop action plans to drive process improvements including flexibility, experimentation and iteration to enable rapid innovation.

By participating in this Executive Session, you will learn how to:

garner support for purposeful investments (in process and organization) early in development, and provide the foundation for a more evolutionary process of learning and adaptation to occur throughout the development cycle
experiment and test frequently without overloading your organization
create a development process that combines the right levels of flexibility and structure
meet your organization’s need for stability while enabling a more fluid and dynamic development environment
break down barriers and shift mindsets in support of development approaches that “fail early and often”
organize for rapid experimentation and manage projects as experiments
implement feedback mechanisms to generate product preferences throughout the development process
implement “front-loaded” innovation processes that identify potential problems before resources are committed and design decisions locked in
develop the foundations of a flexible process - facilitate its implementation and change expectations for the information that is used to monitor (and evaluate) projects
manage development projects in a manner that ensures product flexibility without creating chaos in the development organization
select and exploit new technologies to increase innovation, R&D performance and create real value for your customers

Deliverables

Attending this two-day intensive session will equip you with:

An introduction to the managerial challenges of managing experimentation and iteration as a foundation for faster and better innovation processes
Access to some of the nation’s foremost innovation and product development thought leaders and experts
Knowledge of current research and best practices that have been successful in making leading companies more innovative
Strategies, tools and specific action plans to take back to your organization and initiate an improvement process for your R&D/product development process right away
Full set of materials, cases, and an executive summary of the session’s key learnings written by session facilitator, Preston Smith
A complimentary copy of Stefan Thomke’s book, Experimentation Matters, to take back and share with your team
Key networking contacts with participants and leading experts from a cross section of industries for future resources