Innovating as a Manager
11 February 2021 12:00 - 13:00
How do you drive change inside your team or organization? Today more than ever innovation is required to keep up with the pace of change and the opportunities for disruption -- but how can you build a team of innovators to tackle these opportunities? In this hands-on workshop, we'll explore the ways today's most successful innovation teams operate -- how they build a team, train team members, divide roles, share milestones and deliver on innovation. Drawn from research into hundreds of high performing startup and corporate innovation teams, we'll examine practical approaches to re-think innovation at the team and organization level, explore motivation and tactical decisions managers can make to inspire a team, and explore what goes wrong in innovation failures. Its designed to give any manager or aspiring manager specific skills to manage innovation and change in today's dynamic environment. You'll learn: -- How to build an innovation team for any project or initiative. -- Ideal roles and team size to accomplish rapid change -- When to leverage external resources such as consultants and when to hire and elevate from within -- Approaches to 'test out' talented and ambitious team members on micro-innovation projects for personal growth
Eric Koester has spent much of his career building companies, working with entrepreneurs and writing and teaching around topics of customer discovery, lean, entrepreneurship and innovation. Eric is currently the founder of Main Street Genome, a new technology startup developing tools for the small business economy. Previously, Eric was a co-founder of Zaarly, a marketplace to locate local small businesses and service providers, named by Fast Company as one of the Fifty Most Innovative Companies in the World. He was also an executive at Appature Inc., a cloud-based relationship marketing software company acquired by IMS in 2013; a founder of Learn that Name, acquired by Blackberry in 2010; and a founder/manager of other companies in the environmental consultancy and web development sectors. Eric was recently named one of Washington DC’s “40 under 40” and has written several books on startups and technology, including The Green Entrepreneur Handbook (CRC Press 2011) and Starting a High Tech Business Venture (Taylor & Francis 2010). Eric also devotes considerable time to building the startup community, including as a board member of UP Global and Startup Weekend and the DC co-chair of Enstitute. Eric began his entrepreneurial career as a corporate securities attorney at Cooley LLP, focusing on high-growth startups, venture funds, private equity and technology companies.
