Your Innovation Project forms an essential part of the Workplace Innovation Practitioner Programme, both because it helps you to translate your learning into practice and, of equal importance, because it delivers real benefits to your organisation – ideally a combination of performance improvement, greater capacity for innovation, and enhanced employee engagement and wellbeing. The learning you gain from this experience will be captured in the Learning Log questions in this module, which form a key part of your final assessment.
Innovation Projects can take many forms. They can focus directly on changing workplace practices, for example in response to Workplace Innovation Diagnostic® results. On the other hand, their main focus may be on the development of a new product or service in ways that require innovative ways of working – for example stimulating creative thinking by bringing people together across teams and departments.
The starting point for your Innovation Project is to design an Action Plan. This will help you formulate a clear approach to the aims and objectives of your Innovation Project, plus how it supports your organisation’s values and strategic goals, who you need to involve to ensure its success, and how you will measure and learn from its progress.
To prepare and deliver an effective Action Plan, you will need to be very familiar with the Delivering Strategic Goals & Objectives and People-Centred Change sections of the Programme, and to understand:
- your organisation’s values, strategic goals and priorities;
- the external forces and trends that shape the challenges and opportunities facing your organisation (“Absorptiveness”)
- how to engage and mobilise employees, senior team members and other stakeholders, creating a shared vision for change, framing actions to deliver the vision, and planning for implementation (“Engagement”)
- ways of empowering and motivating employees to use their knowledge, skills and initiative in making change happen (“Empowerment”)
- methodologies for monitoring and reviewing progress (“Monitoring & Reviewing”)
- workplace innovation as a continuous process of learning, adaptation and creative change (“Embedding and Sustaining”).
From this, you will understand that action planning should be a highly collaborative exercise which engages and assimilates the knowledge, experience, skills and creativity of people across the organisation. Our team will discuss your proposed approach in depth, and provide practical suggestions for building inclusive and effective collaboration.
We provide you with a choice of Action Plan templates, each of which enables you to identify, plan and implement ideas for innovation with colleagues in remote locations, supported by our expert team. For some individual projects the Learning Log questions in this module will suffice, and a separate Action Plan template may not be necessary. Your tutor will discuss this with you at the right moment.
You will gain valuable experience from designing and implementing your Action Plan, and the following sections of this module enable you to capture and reflect on the learning outcomes at every stage of the change journey.
This not only forms an important part of the assessment for the ILM Certificate and Workplace Innovation Practitioner status, but will also help you to refine your Innovation Project and improve its effectiveness as you learn from experience.
The following three sections of this module ask you to:
- Summarise the principal features of your Action Plan.
- Chart progress against key milestones throughout the implementation phase and take remedial action where necessary.
- Evaluate outcomes for the organisation and reflect on your personal learning.
[progressally_note note_id=’1′ allow_attachment=’yes’]
