Leading Innovation
Creative Thinking, Design Thinking, and Breakthrough Innovation Through Theatre
Ignite breakthrough innovation through empathy-driven design thinking, collaborative ideation, rapid prototyping, and creative cultures that unleash new products, revenue streams, and competitive edge every organization craves.
What This Programme Is
Leading Innovation develops capacity to foster genuine innovation, think creatively under pressure, prototype rapidly, and build cultures where experimentation thrives. Drawing on Tim Brown's design thinking framework emphasizing empathy, ideation, and rapid prototyping; Teresa Amabile's componential theory of creativity; Ed Catmull's Pixar creative culture principles; and Keith Sawyer's group genius research, this program demonstrates that innovation is fundamentally collaborative and emerges from deep human understanding, divergent exploration, and iterative testing. Theatre has used this methodology for millennia.
What You'll Develop
Core Capabilities:
Design thinking cycle: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test (Brown)
Componential creativity: domain skills, creativity skills, intrinsic motivation (Amabile)
Group genius: collaborative creativity principles (Sawyer)
Creative culture building: psychological safety, peer feedback, embracing failure (Catmull)
Championing innovation: tuned in, turned on, connected (Kanter)
Execution and scaling: dedicated teams, different metrics, crossing the chasm (Govindarajan, Moore)
Who This Is For
Innovation leaders creating new products, services, or business models
Anyone building creative cultures where experimentation is safe
Leaders needing to champion innovation from idea through execution and scaling
Teams requiring breakthrough solutions beyond incremental improvement
Executives fostering organizational creativity and continuous innovation
Format
Highly experiential using Stanislavski character development for empathy, improvisation for ideation, theatrical sketching for prototyping, ensemble devising for group genius, Braintrust feedback practices, and Forum Theatre.
Key Competencies:
Empathy and human-centered design through character work
Divergent and convergent thinking capacity
Rapid prototyping using theatrical sketching
Braintrust-style peer feedback without hierarchy
Integrative thinking: holding opposites creatively
Innovation leadership: championing, overcoming resistance, mobilizing resources
Sustaining innovation: dual operating system, continuous experimentation