Innovation Planning Workshops for Business Planning and Strategy

Our Innovation Planning Workshops are designed to take your team through a rapid-fire exercise to explore and assess multiple new directions for growth, accelerating the process for innovation. We do this by utilizing creative problem-solving and user-centered design analysis and synthesis techniques, as well as business planning and strategic analysis frameworks.

The workshops always involve members of the client team and outside experts, where appropriate. They generally last one to three days, depending on the objectives, and can be used in conjunction with our innovation research programs, or as a stand-alone method.

Alignment Workshop
Need to ensure that your entire team is working toward the same goal? We’ll show you how to create a project road map by analyzing your expectations, direction and objectives.

Envisioning Workshop
Want to discover fresh, new opportunities (i.e. products, services, businesses) for your company to consider? We’ll help you figure out “what’s next” by finding the inter-connections between consumer and market trends, your capabilities as an organization and technologies available.

Translating Insights into Opportunity Workshop
You’ve done some customer research, and have learned a lot, but now what? This workshop is all about making customer insights tangible and relevant in the face of the goals and responsibilities that you have to your organization.

Opportunity Assessment Workshop
Need to know if a new concept or opportunity is strategically sound and has market viability? This workshop will give you the answer, as well as a project road map to follow for any opportunity worth of further exploration.

Case Study

Client:  An Educational Institution

Assignment
Find viable applications in the marketplace for a technology that aids in text adaptation. Initially developed to support K-12 classroom instruction, the client sought to understand if this patented technology had applicability in other industries outside of their traditional market sector.

Approach
Using our Envisioning Workshop, we brought members of the client team and industry experts together to discern which possible industries might have a use for the text adaptation capabilities of the tool. Ten initial directions emerged from that work. Some additional market analysis was done to further narrow the field of possibility down to eight plausible directions. An Opportunity Assessment Workshop was then conducted, where a client leadership team further evaluated each of the eight opportunities for alignment with their mission and the capabilities of their organization.

Outcomes
Over the course of just three days, five feasible commercial applications for the tool were ideated across five different industries. The client is currently evaluating initial market response to the five opportunities, and discussing which markets they want to extend their brand and capabilities into.

"I found this workshop to be one of the most exciting and energizing three days spent in a long time. It was well designed and expertly facilitated. Throughout the entire workshop, Sylver Consulting carefully coordinated each segment of our meetings by providing necessary background information, and educating us on the tool’s protocol, triggering and maintaining a steady and focused idea flow, keeping the ideas appropriately targeted and skillfully inspiring and guiding participant synergy. A truly enlightening experience."

- W.R., Medical Writer/Workshop Participant