Our Signature Workshops
All worskhops are available as a series or separately.
In an on-demand format for your organization or in an open enrollment cohort format.
7 strategic topics
Peer learning
Practical results from every session
Expert advice and guidance
If you’re an innovator, especially if your work depends on people outside your own organization, you’re facing even more than the usual amount of uncertainty.
The good news is, as an innovator you know there are tools and processes designed precisely for making sense of human needs during uncertain times. The Corporate Accelerator Forum, in collaboration with complex systems expert Dr. Linda Booth Sweeney, has drawn together a key set of these tools, chosen especially for people working in open innovation.
Come together with other innovators to make sense of the landscape from multiple perspectives and move forward with expanded vision!
Workshop 1: Seeking Signals
*Long-Term Thinking in a Pandemic-Changed World (previously recorded, watch on your own time)
Sean Ness of the Institute for the Future peeks around the corner at what might be coming. Exercise your forecasting muscles before you start digging into your own future.
Workshop 2: Reading Signals, Writing Consequences:
This forecasting and scenario planning workshop uses the lessons and tools learned in Long-Term Thinking (see above), applied directly to the signals you see in your organization and industry. Outcome: the Working Group’s perspective on the most likely outcomes from signals in your particular space. Pro Tip — attend our preview session to develop meaningful signals so you’re sure to start with good material!
Workshop 3: Innovation Strategy & Communications:
We build a Boni-Joseph Innovation Dashboard for your open innovation mission and set you up to test and refine it with your internal stakeholders. Get everyone on the same page before you start.
Workshop 4: Metrics & Storytelling
Based on what you and your stakeholders need, decide how you’ll communicate the patterns, lessons learned, and impact of your work.
Workshops 5-7: The Experiment Series
Experiment Selection
What real experiments will you invest your time in, based on your strategy, your predictions, and what’s needed for impact in your specific setting? Identify your lowest-cost, highest return learning opportunities, and your riskiest hypothesis. We’ll walk together through a concrete process and set you up to lead your organization into an uncertain future through systematic investigation.
Experiment Design
Create a specific plan for your first experiment, complete with supplies, resources, dates, and a step-by-step investigation recipe.
Experiment Execution
Share back what you’ve learned so far, and we’ll guide your next steps!
Forum Members know what they need to think about together to move forward. We create 2-hour and half-day workshops so Members and visitors can address these questions together. Our next workshop is: Back to the Office!
The Uncertainty Series: Welcome to the New World, 101
If you’re an innovator, especially if your work depends on people outside your own organization, you’ve been facing even more than the usual amount of uncertainty in the last year or so.
The good news is, as an innovator you know there are tools and processes designed precisely for making sense of human needs during uncertain times. The Corporate Accelerator Forum, in collaboration with complex systems expert Dr. Linda Booth Sweeney, has drawn together a key set of these tools, chosen especially for people working in open innovation. This series is free for Members and available for a fee to others.
You’ll have a clear strategic framework, tested and customized with your internal stakeholders. By the end of session 7, you’ll have completed the first phase of an experiment, complete with lessons learned, framed the way your stakeholders receive them most effectively.
Request a workshop
Key Benefits
Impactful, efficient, just-in time learning
Hands-on experiences developed by a learning scientist
Content you need, and content you didn’t know you need
Workshop themes are drawn from the trickiest elements of on-the-ground open innovation practice, and addressed through both well-known tools and custom CAF tools
(Premium) Selected non-competitive cohort
We bring together open innovators from different contexts to attack their toughest open innovation challenges in concert
What Participants Are Saying
The workshops and various meetings are all done with a unique methodology that creates an interactive & immersive experience to the members and attendees. The CAF creates a safe environment to share and openly discuss all aspects of technology acceleration from not just the corporate side, but the start-up perspective also.
The high quality and easily accessible CAF staff for consulting on everything from accelerator strategy to personal coaching has been of great value.
Lee Boman
Director, Palo Alto Advanced Technology Center, Eastman Chemical Company
Discovered expectations for deliverables between startups and strategics are surprisingly well aligned … Facilitation was deft and seamless, both guiding exercises and the behind the scenes support.
Adam
Advanced Materials
