How to manage an innovation project and how to keep the balance between creativity and concreteness. OMM© Innovation Management specifically aims at managing innovation projects. This course takes you beyond a course in project management.

Innovation means among other things greater risks and a large likelihood to be cancelled prematurely. This requires a specific mind set from the project manager and his or her team. Creating support from stakeholders and from other functions in the organisation is different for innovation projects. Sales for example, could easily question whether an innovation project contributes to achieving the KPI’s. And Operations might not be interested in interrupting production for the sake of an ‘experiment’. OMM© Innovation Management helps you to manage an innovation project.

Sick and tired of all kinds of extensive Excel and MS Project planning schemes? Lean Decision Based Planning is the newest planning methods for projects. This method makes sure that you will:

• Plan on the basis of decisions instead of activities. This results in shorter lead-times
• Erase waste from your planning
• Create clear decision making and infoflows with stakeholders
• Have a proper start for SCRUM or AGILE methods.

Lean Decision Based Planning is also very appropriate for planning innovation projects. The base for Lean Decision Based Planning is being made with the entire project team. This guarantees support from all functions and a realistic planning. During this course you will learn how to set up a Lean Decision Based Planning and how to organise a follow-up.

Drs. Jane Zuidema, CEO of MANS Business Consultancy and OMM© developer, is your facilitator in discussing the dilemmas CEO’s experience when they identify the necessity to innovate. Depending on the life cycle of the organisation, as well as that of the product or service, various options arise. Also, various forms of innovation will be discussed. The base for this workshop has been described in her book Slow down to speed up, the CEO’s innovation squeeze.

How to create more entrepreneurship in your innovation projects? The OMM© Innovation Management Scan is a quick and effective way to gain insight in your innovation management approach and to refine this into the kind of innovation you find appropriate for your organisation.

Do you know that mature innovation teams find it more difficult to escalate in time. And that they are less capable of being a real team as a result of which the chances for radical innovation decrease? The OMM© Innovation Management Scan is about:

• Teaming up through the chain
• Identifying what type of innovation is achievable and what type is not within an existing organisational structure and hierarchy
• Identifying pressure points in projects, planning and power (hierarchy)
• Defining core activities

The method for an innovation management scan is qualitative research. It consists of two days of desk research and interviews with fifteen to thirty workers who are involved in the innovation process. The entire scan consists of:

• Projects: what kind of projects have been successful, which proposals did not even pass the feasibility test?
• Organisational level: how does the current organisation facilitate innovation and what kind of innovation is concerned?
• Psychological level: what are the psychological drivers of the organisation and effect do they have?
• Project team: matureness with respect to functions
• Psychological footprint

Our OMM© professionals facilitate Kick-offs for organisations in practice. When inexperienced in organising Kick-offs, it can be very meaningful to let us do it. It is a specific kind of learning on the job. If innovation projects are concerned, specific issues such as the life cycle of organisations, products or services, are being addressed.