The Benefits
•A
pply innovation techniques that the most successful companies in the world use to your own company
projects in order to improve solutions, create offers that connect with customers, and better manage the
project within the organisation.
•B
uild stronger teams and systems to create positive change in your company’s service offers and
organisational behaviour.
• I ntegrate learning new concept development and management processes with your real-world
work over a multi-month, 9-session timeframe. Hands-on, project-based work ensures absorption of
innovation methods. Work with a set of methods that you will adapt during the course to create your
company-specific innovation toolboxes.
What You’ll Be Saying
•O
ur project teams know they’re implementing the right concepts.
• We always say “We have enough ideas...” But now we explore for the best ideas. Best for our customers
and partners... well-managed with respect to performance, quality, resources, and capacity... resulting in
more effective solutions for our innovation, strategy, and development work.
• We’re introducing “design-thinking” teamwork techniques to our most critical project work - including
customer ethnography, idea expansion and prototyping - while grounding this in operational excellence.
•N
ow we have a repeatable innovation and project process that our teams can follow; staff in different
departments can understand each others’ methods and project progress.
• We’re now able to grow our top-line rather than just reduce our operational costs.
Course Leaders’ Bio’s
Keith Finglas is an experienced programme manager and team leader, used to managing and delivering
scopes around strategy, routine objectives and crisis situations - or what one client called ‘living in the
middle of gory messes.‘ He helps teams do projects better, either by improving their solutions through
the application of “design thinking”or improving their execution strengths through good project
management skills, processes and behaviours. Keith believes almost all teams are capable of surpassing
the expectations placed on them, if given the chance to participate and contribute.
Keith has been based in Europe, U.S.A., South America, Middle and Far East, spending 21 years for
G.E. (U.S.A.), Guinness U.K. and Intel Ireland, where his ultimate position was innovation project office
manager. Leading Innovation Delivery, he has worked in innovation in many sectors in Ireland,including
Food/Drink, Financial Services, Electronic Devices,Services and Education.
Chris Kurjan is a practitioner, coach and thought leader around innovation and the skills and structures
that companies and teams need to work well and successfully. She leads strategy and idea generation
workshops, teaches masters students and corporate groups, benchmarks innovation practices across
industry sectors and within companies, and consults to start-ups and established companies to improve
their product strategy and design for usability, desirability, feasibility and viability.
Chris advocates taking a balanced, design-thinking approach, working at the intersection of people’s
needs, technology potential, and business possibilities.
Her experience includes 15 years of engineering, design and innovation work with IDEO (international
innovation and design firm) where she worked on technical design and customer experience in
healthcare, financial services, car washes, toilet paper, moisturizer, cleaning products, high-speed cooking,
museums, medical products, departmental strategy, organisational change and knowledge management.
Graduate Diploma
in Innovation Financial Services
ICBE
The Irish Centre for Business Excellence (ICBE) is a non-profit organisation established by leading
companies on the island of Ireland. We are a network of organisations who demonstrate a deep
commitment to Continuous Improvement and the pursuit of Business Excellence.
Address
ICBE
15 Eastlink Business Park,
Ballysimon Road,
Limerick, Ireland.
Contact Us
Tel: +353 (0)61 423622
Fax: +353 (0)61 603785
Email: pat@icbe.ie
Web: www.icbe.ie
www.icbe.ie
COURSE PROSPECTUS: Practical and Management Approaches to
Innovation and Management of Services
We offer a spectrum of coursework, from 2-day workshops, to a belt
system, to a graduate level course.
Who is this programme for?
The first four sessions immerse participants in a new way of working together.
Teams collaborate to create a new service, unrelated to day-to-day work.
Financial services professionals from institutions of various sizes - large, medium, small - and purpose
- banks, credit unions, insurers, ICT solutions providers, government bodies. From a cross-section
of departments - planning, legal, HR, software development, front office staff, innovation. Playing
different roles – customer-facing, technical, strategic, management and more.
Organisations that wish to:
• Explore and implement their approach to innovation or to customer experience.
• Manage their critical projects more successfully, whether they are facing gory messes or exploring
opportunities.
• Bring staff up to speed on highly effective methods for collaboration that result in an appropriately
broad solution space for their challenges and well chosen, well planned projects to move forward
with. Those who typically take our courses are Senior management teams Programme managers
Technical leads Entrepreneurs Department leaders Project teams Business managers.
What will you get out of it?
Both global surveys and local conversations with financial services professionals bring up a number of
concerns to address in a course such as this.
• Better inclusion of customers and stakeholders in the innovation process.
• Increased interdepartmental connectivity.
• Improved communications among teams and ability to collaborate to solve difficult challenges.
• Enriched communications with the public, drawing value from them into the development process.
• Connection of more employees to innovation efforts, especially front-line staff.
• Knowing your organisation’s Innovation Orientation and understanding the contribution from
different roles.
• Having an innovation and development process… as opposed to the current status: “It just happens.”
What this course is
We’ll learn and practice techniques to:
• Improve interdepartmental and team collaboration.
• Include customers and other stakeholders in concept and product/service development.
• Use innovation methods like cross-pollination, empathy mapping, prototyping, concept portfolios,
and open innovation to come up with fresh ideas and gain buy-in from others.
• Explore how we can apply recent financial services innovations.
• Understand your company’s innovation orientation and how to build a system for innovation.
• Consider your company’s innovation strategy broadly before narrowing your focus. You’ll have the
option to apply innovation techniques to a business or personal project and/or contribute to a
research project in financial services innovation, depending on the level of effort, university credit or
belt status desired.
What this course isn’t
1
2
3
4
Understanding
Customers and
Stakeholders
Information and
Inspiration
Idea Gen
and Rough
Prototyping
Experiments for
Buy-In and
Leadership
Defining the Brief
Opportunity Space
Complete by creating a plan for applying these techniques at work.
In the next three sessions you begin to apply the techniques to a workplace project.
Above plus…
Apply innovation techniques to a work-related exploration.
Contribute to a research project in financial services.
5
6
7
Stakeholder
Management
Appropriate
Technology
Globalisation and
Outsourcing
Market Research
Social Media
Higher Resolution
Concept Pitches
Explore an Opportunity Area from your workplace. Complete by prototyping two to three strong concepts.
Complete the graduate course with a final two sessions.
Above plus…
Use innovation techniques to develop one work-related concept from the Exploration to the
Experiment stage.
8
9
Service Blueprint
Implementation
Issues and Plans
User Experience
Innovation Systems
With participants, we’ll select financial services “hot topics” to address and apply in each session.
A way to deepen your technical capabilities in financial services, such as managing financial
performance or risk.
What’s the know-how and experience behind it?
The innovation expertise comes from Keith Finglas and Chris Kurjan of Innovation Delivery; they
teach similar courses of various lengths for Masters students and Corporate participants at UCD and
elsewhere. These courses involve innovation teamwork, idea management and coaching project teams.
Additional lecturers and contributors have both academic and industry experience in financial services
in Ireland and the U.S.
Programme Outcomes
• Application of innovation and management tools, methods, structures and systems to financial services.
• A collected toolkit of innovation methods and systems that is customised for your company.
• Connections within your own organisation and beyond to a network that will support innovation.
• Experience running an innovation project in your company, delivering a business feasibility plan and prototypes.
• Assessment of your company’s innovation orientation and programme management readiness.