Innovation as a differentiating factor in an increasingly competitive market

Bridgeable was approached by our client to support the development and implementation of a new employee-focused innovation program, which sought to differentiate the firm from its competitors. This program enables employees to develop design thinking and entrepreneurial skills in order to help them rapidly and innovatively develop solutions to important internal business challenges.

A hands-on approach to up-skilling and engaging employees

In order to help employees hone their design thinking and entrepreneurial skills, we developed a training curriculum combining theory with applied, hands-on activities teaching the fundamentals of design thinking. The trainings focused on how to create innovative and viable solutions to business challenges grounded in stakeholder needs.

We developed two training sessions that helped employees understand how to frame business challenges, empathize with key stakeholders, generate potential solutions, and test these solutions for desirability, viability, and feasibility in order to generate value for the organization.

From understanding to action

Within a few weeks of completing their trainings, a select group of employees, divided into three teams, was invited to a week-long innovation sprint. Each team was assigned a specific business challenge to solve. These challenges were inspired by actual business priorities and submitted by the senior leaders who sponsored the project. Each team was asked to leverage its new skills and knowledge to come up with innovative solutions that would generate value for the organization.

Solutions designed during the innovation sprint have been enthusiastically received by the institution’s senior leadership and have impressed the project’s business sponsors, who are currently lending their support to the implementation of some of these ideas. Only a few days after the end of innovation week, one of the teams already had part of their solution implemented by the business sponsor, and another was going forward with an expansion of their work toward a larger implementation plan.

Employees report being 25% more confident in their understanding of how to generate solutions grounded in unmet key stakeholder needs and 23% more confident in their understanding of how to evaluate whether solutions create value for the organization. They’ve also taken their learnings back to their departments and their day-to-day jobs, organizing mini innovation sprints and repeating the program with other staff and interns.