Innovation Culture and Agile Business Model Transformation

Innovation Culture and Agile Business Model Transformation is a 5-day course on leading innovation and digital transformation through an innovation culture, agile experimentation and new digital business models. It is designed for managers who own growth, new products or change portfolios and need ideas to become tested ventures. You take back the Innovation Portfolio and Business Model Canvas Pack. The course is delivered by Mercury Training Center.

About This Course

Many organizations digitize existing processes yet still struggle to generate, test and scale new ideas. To follow this course, you should already lead a team or a change initiative and read basic business cases. You practice by mapping innovation portfolios, running design sprints and testing business model hypotheses on realistic cases.

Who It Is For

• Managers responsible for growth targets, new services or revenue diversification
• Leaders responsible for innovation labs, idea pipelines or intrapreneurship schemes
• Change and transformation leads responsible for moving teams to agile ways of working
• Product and service owners responsible for customer value and digital offerings
• Strategy staff responsible for evaluating new business models and partnerships

This course is not for technical staff who want to configure digital platforms, who are better served by a technology implementation course, nor for executives seeking a broad digital strategy overview, who are better served by a general digital leadership course.

Competencies You Will Build

• Innovation Culture Building: you set behaviors, rituals and incentives that let teams propose and test ideas safely
• Innovation Portfolio Management: you balance core, adjacent and transformational bets and fund them in stages
• Business Model Design: you redesign how value is created, delivered and captured with digital channels
• Agile Experimentation: you turn assumptions into small tests and decide quickly to pivot, persevere or stop
• Agile Transformation Leadership: you move teams from plan-driven projects to iterative, customer-led delivery
• Innovation Metrics: you track learning, adoption and value with measures beyond traditional return figures

What You Will Be Able to Do

By the end of the course you will be able to:

• From an innovation culture survey, identify the barriers that stop staff from proposing ideas and plan three corrective actions
• Given a list of current initiatives, classify them on the Three Horizons model and rebalance the portfolio
• Using the Business Model Canvas, redesign an existing service into a digital business model with a clear revenue logic
• From a set of customer interviews, write testable value hypotheses and design a minimum viable product to test them
• Given a team still running sequential projects, draft an agile transformation roadmap with roles, cadence and governance
• Using pilot results, prepare a stage-gate funding recommendation to scale, pivot or stop an innovation

Course Content

Day 1: Innovation Leadership and Culture Foundations

• Innovation Types: Incremental, Adjacent and Disruptive Change in Service Organizations
• Innovation Culture Diagnostics and Psychological Safety in Teams
• Leadership Behaviors That Encourage Idea Generation and Smart Failure
• Idea Management Systems and Employee Suggestion Pipelines
• Innovation Governance Roles, Sponsors and Decision Rights

Day 2: Innovation Strategy and Portfolio Management

• Three Horizons Model for Balancing Core and Future Growth
• Innovation Ambition Matrix and Resource Allocation Choices
• Stage-Gate and Metered Funding for Innovation Initiatives
• Open Innovation with Startups, Suppliers and Universities
• Innovation Accounting and Learning Metrics for Early Ventures

Day 3: Digital Business Model Innovation

• Business Model Canvas Applied to Existing Products and Services
• Value Proposition Canvas and Customer Jobs, Pains and Gains
• Platform, Subscription and Data-Driven Revenue Models
• Ecosystem Partnerships and Digital Channel Design
• Business Model Risk Assessment and Cannibalization Analysis

Day 4: Agile Transformation and Experimentation

• Design Thinking and Design Sprint Methods for Customer Problems
• Lean Startup Build-Measure-Learn Cycles and Minimum Viable Products
• Scrum and Kanban Adoption for Business and Service Teams
• Agile Operating Model: Cross-Functional Squads, Cadence and Governance
• Managing Resistance and Middle Management in Agile Transformation

Day 5: Applied Innovation Practice and Portfolio Pack

• Exercise Diagnosing an Innovation Culture and Setting Leadership Actions
• Exercise Rebalancing an Innovation Portfolio Across Three Horizons
• Exercise Redesigning a Service Business Model and Testing Its Hypotheses
• Pitching an Innovation Case to a Funding Committee
• Completing the Innovation Portfolio and Business Model Canvas Pack

Case Studies and Exercises

The following are suggested activities used during the course.

• Case study: a retail bank facing digital-only competitors; you redesign a lending service on the Business Model Canvas and choose which hypotheses to test first.
• Case study: a hospital group with a stalled idea scheme; you diagnose the innovation culture and decide the leadership actions that restart staff participation.
• Exercise: a logistics company moving operations teams to agile ways of working; you draft the squad structure, cadence and governance for the first pilot.
• Exercise: an energy utility with too many pilots and little scaling; you rank the portfolio and decide which initiatives to fund, pivot or stop.

What You Take Back

You return with the Innovation Portfolio and Business Model Canvas Pack. In your first month back, you use it to map your unit's initiatives on three horizons, redesign one service as a digital business model, and run the first experiment with a small cross-functional team.

• Innovation culture diagnostic and leadership action plan
• Three Horizons portfolio map with stage-gate funding criteria
• Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas templates with hypothesis log
• Agile transformation roadmap with squad roles and cadence

Quick Answers (FAQ)

What should I know before innovation and digital transformation leadership training?

You should already lead a team, project or change initiative and be comfortable reading a simple business case. No coding or technical background is needed, since the focus is on leading people, portfolios and business models.

How does innovation and digital transformation leadership differ from general digital transformation leadership?

General digital transformation leadership focuses on aligning technology, strategy and teams with business goals. Innovation and digital transformation leadership concentrates on building an innovation culture, running agile experiments and designing new digital business models that create fresh sources of value.

Why do organizations need agile business model innovation?

Digital competitors change customer expectations and pricing faster than annual plans can respond. Agile business model innovation lets an organization test new value propositions cheaply, learn from customers and scale only what works, which reduces the risk of large failed investments.

What do I take back from innovation and digital transformation leadership training?

You take back the Innovation Portfolio and Business Model Canvas Pack, with a culture diagnostic, a portfolio map, canvas templates with a hypothesis log and an agile transformation roadmap ready for your own unit.

For Your Manager

After the course, your team member will be able to diagnose the unit's innovation culture, rebalance its initiative portfolio and redesign a service as a digital business model tested through agile experiments. They return with the Innovation Portfolio and Business Model Canvas Pack, which they first apply to the unit's current initiative list and one pilot experiment.