IGERT Story
Omar Asensio Leads Fostering Innovation Workshop, Austin, Texas
Fostering Innovation Workshop
Description
Omar Asensio led a 4-hour Innovation workshop at the 67th Southwest Regional ACS Meeting in Austin, Texas. The title of the session was “Fostering Innovation: Styles and Process” and is part of the ACS Leadership Development System.
I had a lot of fun discussing innovation processes at the individual and organizational level. In total, there were 26 registered participants for the workshop in Austin. In the audience, I had chemists and chemical engineers from industry, government and academia.
About the Workshop
Fostering Innovation is a 4-hour facilitated course. In the first hour, I cover characteristics of successful innovations and individual styles for team building.
Participants are asked to come up with an innovation challenge which they work on throughout the session. Participants are split up into 4 teams by their innovation style (visionaries, refiners, experimenters, philosophers) after doing a psychological questionnaire based on Kolbs’ Learning Styles.
Teams work on a real innovation challenge using a systematic, four-step process: (i) Benchmarking (ii) Generating Ideas (iii) Evaluating and Prioritizing Ideas (iv) Leading Implementation. We elect scribes and one person from each team to do report-outs at the end of each step.
In the last hour, the teams report to the entire audience on their prioritized strategy for implementation.
The take home message from this workshop is that innovation is not just about invention or novelty, but is a process that can be managed.
