This live, interactive course builds your skills to go deeper into the methods of innovation management to systematically evaluate your new ideas. These steps provide the critical leadership skills necessary to gain support for innovation projects and products as your corporate anti-bodies begin to attack your efforts. You must be prepared, and with the right approach and tactics you’ll not only survive, but will gain a reputation as an innovative thinker and leader.

Key questions this course will answer along with many others:

• What are the best ways to determine if a new idea is worthy of an enhanced product, a new product or incubation?
• How can you get the right data to support your new idea?
• Who should be involved and how do you easily manage a project to build a concise, compelling business case?
• hat are the key factors executives use when deciding whether to support a new innovative product or opportunity?
• What are the key elements of a business case when requesting resources for a technology, major enhancement or new product?
• How can you build a business case that gains support fast?
• What is the secret to presenting a business case that immediately gains a “yes” from management?

Agenda

PART 1: THE BUSINESS CASE A CRITICAL INNOVATION TOOL

We’ll start with an overview of the full innovation framework, the idea pipeline and how the important tool of businesses cases are used at each stage.

• The structure of concise business cases along with four critical success factors when selling ideas
• The top five questions executives will ask
• The right use of one, three and nine-page business cases
• Case Study: Real world business cases that worked and didn’t work to gain corporate funding

PART 2: KEY ELEMENTS OF GREAT BUSINESS CASES – STEP-BY-STEP

• Quantifying and communicating value for key stakeholders – customers, executives, and company
• Understanding, communicating and mitigating the REAL risk factors
• Estimating real market potential and timing and/or value of your opportunity to the satisfaction of decision-makers
• Case Study: 30 days idea development in action with opportunity proposals

PART 3: SELLING YOUR BUSINESS CASE

Any time you’re looking for support and funding, you must sell. This is an activity to master as much as the development of the innovation itself. In this section, we’ll cover:

• Creating a selling plan for your new idea
• Four key influencing strategies that work
• Making the big pitch using messages that sell to management
• Dos and don’ts of pitching your big idea
• Case studies: Business case reviews and postmortems
• Tips for success:  Based on our experience with dozens of innovation business cases and projects we’ll share some of the common challenges to expect when pitching your ideas