Creativity and Innovation in Training

Our recent Lectora® Unscripted session on Ideas and Innovation in Training was so popular that we decided to delve a little deeper into some of the resources that Simon Birt and Lee Kitchen shared.

Lee Kitchen of The Walt Disney Company talked about how he trains Disney employees to think of creative ways to improve customer services and relations. To do this, he took tools that have been available for a while and designed his own toolbox. He then branded this as the “Toybox” and tailored it to suit the Disney culture. And there’s no reason why you can’t do the same for your office!

Disney Toybox Workshop

The Toybox workshop is an internal Disney Parks interactive and immersive two-day training experience that focuses on Creative Problem Solving for Innovation and Creativity. It’s designed to help both teams and individuals get out of their “rivers of thinking” (day-to-day expertise which may be preventing true innovation) and help participants tackle challenges from a fresh perspective, using tools (referred to as “toys”) they have never used before. The process can be applied to an entirely new challenge or simply one that has needed an innovative solution for a while.

Here are some approaches and companies to reference if you want to create your own Toybox:

• ?What If!’’s Innovation Education:

?What If!’s innovation education covers the entire innovation journey, from the sometimes amorphous front-end all the way through to getting new ideas out into the world. The high-impact curriculum contains expert content taken from years of frontline innovation experience. Programs embed the right skills and behaviors, create a shared language around innovation and inspire the energy and confidence required to truly innovate.

• ThinkX’s The Productive Thinking Process:

ThinkX was founded on three overarching beliefs:

1. The most productive priority for any organization is the development of its intellectual and creative capital, so it can tap into the wisdom of its people.
2. Although many people talk about innovation, few understand how to make it happen.
3. How we think can be more important than what we know.

• IDEO’s Design Thinking Approach:

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

—Tim Brown, president and CEO of IDEO

The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation and implementation. Inspiration is the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions. Ideation is the process of generating, developing and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.

Now that you’re feeling inspired, you’re going to need the perfect authoring tool to create materials for your innovative training program. Lectora® Inspire is here for you!

We also have all the resources and tips you need to make sure your training’s appearance is as cutting edge as its strategy:

• e-Learning What Not to Do… BuzzFeed Style!
• Trends We’re Watching in the e-Learning World
• Top 10 Branching Scenario Techniques
• Using jQuery and Lectora to Customize Your e-Learning Courses: Part 1
• Free Design Resources for Your e-Learning
• The Editor’s Guide to Perfecting an e-Learning Course

To get more creative ideas and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to the Lectora e-Learning Blog. And don’t forget to register for the next Lectora Unscripted webinar!