Welcome to the Teaching and Coaching SIG Newsletter!
This is the latest in a series of regular updates about activities across our growing community. Hopefully you’ll find the information about events, resources, ideas and people helpful – and like any community, we’ll all benefit if you add your own contribution to the mix.
About the group…..
The innovation frontier is constantly moving and the role of research is to explore and develop understanding of what is going on at that frontier. But at the same time we need to be able to bring the messages back and share them, building our understanding of what makes for effective innovation management in a changing world. This places emphasis on ‘teaching and coaching’– enabling learning about how to build, sustain and extend innovation management capability. And the process of trying to communicate and share these ideas inevitably raises new questions which feed back into the research agenda.
So how do we manage the innovation management teaching, coaching and training challenge? It is not simple – first of all our audiences are diverse, ranging from undergraduate students through to experienced practitioners and policy-makers. And the range of approaches available to us is equally wide – we can learn from case studies, simulations, reflective exercises, games and online interaction as well as through core conventional lectures. And the media which we can deploy offers a third dimension of variety – from traditional books and papers to audio and video and increasing real-time interaction across social networking space.
Given ISPIM’s commitment to excellence in promoting understanding of innovation management it is appropriate that we focus some of our efforts on sharing and developing our understanding of innovation management teaching in its various forms. That’s the role of this SIG – to create a community of practice across which we can learn, share and develop our capabilities to teach, coach and train as well as research and to promote close interaction between the these worlds.
Our Facebook page
We’ve now got over 500 members in the group and there’s a growing amount of interesting ‘traffic’ on the page – so if you haven’t yet signed up do take a look and catch up on some of the interesting developments. And feel free to post something, join in with the community.
Our LinkedIn group
We’re also running a LinkedIn group which allows us to open up more of a discussion and to post longer articles, etc. Please sign up – the details are here:
Workshops
Over the past year we have held several events, notably well-attended sessions in Malaysia, Vienna and Melbourne where we explored a variety of new approaches to teaching and coaching innovation. You can still find some details here:
The next workshop is planned for the ISPIM Conference 2018 in Stockholm where there will be a variety of papers, reports and interactive sessions. And this year we’re following the conference with a 1 day workshop designed to explore some new and some well-established tools and techniques around teaching and coaching innovation. More details here:
It will also offer insights and introduction to the tools being developed within the major EU TACIT project – see below for more.
TACIT – Teaching and Coaching Innovation Innovatively
This is a programme run as part of the European Union’s Erasmus Plus initiative and is base don what they call a Knowledge Alliance involving companies (Lego, Aachen-Münchner Insurance, Nokia, BMW, Lufthansa Systems, Torbay Hospital Trust) and universities (Exeter, Southern Denmark, HHL Leipzig, RWTH Aachen). It is exploring novel approaches to teaching and coaching innovation in eight key areas:
Project-based learning
Entrepreneur-labs and accelerators
Storytelling
Innovation theatre
Games and gamification
Design thinking and making
Futures-based learning
Peripatetic learning
You can find out more here:
Resources
One of the ways in which we hope the SIG can be useful is in providing a library of resources which you can draw on to help with our teaching and coaching activity. There are many different cases, tools, videos, audio and other materials available, all free and open to use. You can currently find them on the website:
Recent additions include:
Piers Ibbotson video interview drawing on insights into innovation leadership from a former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company
A case study from Lufthansa Systems describing their use of an innovation accelerator within their employee involvement programme
Blog pieces on incremental innovation (‘Sweating the small stuff’), humanitarian innovation and what underpins the innovation success of companies which survive to celebrate their one hundredth birthday
If you’ve got resources you’d like to share on this platform, do let us know and we’ll add them. And we’ll try to keep you updated – via the Newsletter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages – when we add interesting new stuff.
Spread the word
We’d like to grow the SIG and the community of practice which it represents. So please let us know what you’re doing, what you’re interested in, what you’d like to see. Do tell anyone else you think might be keen to join. And if (sadly) you want to unsubscribe from this Newsletter then please let me know.
With innovative best wishes
John Bessant