(CLP) Programs

Appleton Greene corporate training programs are all process-driven. They are used as vehicles to implement tangible business processes within clients’ organizations, together with training, support and facilitation during the use of these processes. Corporate training programs are therefore implemented over a sustainable period of time, that is to say, between 1 year (incorporating 12 monthly workshops), and 4 years (incorporating 48 monthly workshops). Your program information guide will specify how long each program takes to complete. Each monthly workshop takes 6 hours to implement and can be undertaken either on the client’s premises, an Appleton Greene serviced office, or online via the internet. This enables clients to implement each part of their business process, before moving onto the next stage of the program and enables employees to plan their study time around their current work commitments. The result is far greater program benefit, over a more sustainable period of time and a significantly improved return on investment.

Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. All (CLP) programs are implemented over a sustainable period of time, usually between 1-4 years, incorporating 12-48 monthly workshops and professional support is consistently provided during this time by qualified learning providers and where appropriate, by Accredited Consultants.

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Executive summary

High-Performance Innovation

History

Innovation is one of the major levers of our evolution. It characterizes and triggers the major phases of history, from the facilitation of transport thanks to the introduction of the wheel to the management of terrestrial resources thanks to space observation, passing through the distribution of books thanks to the introduction of printing.

Each of these steps is the result of the conjunction of two phenomena: the generation of an idea and the transformation of this idea into a process deployed on a large scale. Two types of actors are systematically necessary to achieve this, innovators and transformers, researchers and industrialists, triggers, and leaders. The organizations hosting the most impactful innovations are not always the ones that benefit the most. Let us think of the founders of McDonald’s who imagined a concept with great potential and of their partner who was able to deploy it on a large scale, thus realizing this potential. Examples of this dissociation between ideation and scaling up abound: the Wright brothers and the major brands in the aeronautics industry, the creators of the concept behind Facebook and Facebook, the development of rocket propulsion and its military and space applications; but also lesser known but equally impactful devices such as ubiquitous (yet invisible to the general public) cybersecurity applications, invented by an individual and filed in the patent office by a separate organization, or exotic financial products first tested on the market by a boutique, before becoming the norm when a large bank decided to industrialize them.

Conversely, there are in history organizations capable of generating a large number of ideas, sorting them, prioritizing them and transforming them into profitable and sustainable products and services, even structuring for society as a whole. The saga of the digital revolution, at work since the invention of the microprocessor in 1971, has produced champions of high-performance innovation who have been able to maximize their gains and limit their losses. Because innovating means making mistakes, infrequently and not for long, and focusing on good ideas, more often and for much longer. Let’s think of Apple, ABC, LinkedIn or Microsoft to name just a few examples. In the entertainment industry, Pixar and Disney have developed a culture of innovation that is both very free and very structured; in reality, whenever the question of investing arises, a rational approach systematically complements the creative process. Organizations capable of achieving the symbiosis between freedom to innovate and the ability to focus on the right priorities have always come out on top, including in ultra-competitive environments.

Since the end of the twentieth century, the importance taken by the control of the innovation process in the performance of companies does not stop growing. While between the end of the Second World War and the turn of the century, the key to success lay above all in a race for volumes to optimize the price-quality couple, since the end of the 1990s differentiation has been the new Grail. Why? Quite simply because thanks to the digital revolution, access to information has become rapid and general, allowing everyone to assemble the knowledge available to transform it first into a concept, then into products and services. The meta-strategy of any organization therefore consists in realizing the immense potential constituted by the knowledge of humanity, which has become deeper and more accessible than ever (see figure A below).

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Current position

Nowadays, innovation has become an imposed theme of every board of directors, every institutional communication, every marketing campaign or every message addressed to staff. From this point of view, we can say that the innovation dynamic has reached a certain maturity.

Curiously, innovation is less present or unequally present at the level of customer relationship management, training, establishment and monitoring of budgets, investment, piloting, management, career management, automation, partnership management, mergers and acquisitions, benchmarking, strategic planning, or commercial action. Indeed, innovation as a major performance lever has not yet completely supplanted strategies based on the race for volume, especially since the realization of the potential of an innovation often depends on a transition to successful scale. There is therefore confusion between the old approach consisting in sustainably dominating a market thanks to its size, and a new approach consisting in managing its competitive edge by introducing new families of products and services at a sustained pace. The key difference lies in the lifespan of the product families. Although the Bic Cristal pen has been around since 1950 without any real evolution, the latest iPhone is as different from the first as a modern car can be from a Fort T. However, only a few years have passed since the introduction of the iPhone 2G on the market (in 2007).

Based on this observation, it is now essential to steer your innovation process to make it both fertile and profitable, creative and rational, borrowing the best from the left brain and the right brain. This imperative is made all the more critical as the valuations of innovations measured by the statistics and forecasts in the private equity sector are melting like snow in the sun. We are witnessing a real flight to quality, a well-known phenomenon when times are uncertain or when a chronic crisis dynamic forces leaders to manage emergencies more often than they would like. What prevails for scaleups and unicorns, which are often very specialized, is also structuring for diversified companies, because all of them must innovate. Knowing how to sort and stimulate, measure and encourage, choose and finance, decide and support is at the heart of the performance of the company of our time (see figure B below).

By pushing this logic to the limit, an ideal model emerges. It takes up certain characteristics of historical models, such as the matrix organization of General Electric, or the cellular organization of Microsoft, by sublimating them. Its ultimate outcome is a collection of hyper-growing spin-offs fueled by activities that have already reached their maturity stage, serving as a crucible for future innovations. More and more concrete examples are now operational: financial groups succeed in carve-out and IPO of hyper-growing activities supported both by exceptional market dynamics and by the promotion of a internal breakthrough innovation culture; pharmaceutical groups successfully arbitrate, on very specific perimeters, between in-house R&D and collaborations with biotechs on a human scale, or even buy them out if necessary; finally, digital service companies manage to isolate process outsourcing offerings allowing them to move up the value chain.

In a world where an unprecedented quantity of knowledge is accessible to a large number of actors, the intensity of disruptive innovation is increasingly strong. An indication of this trend is given by the combined inflation of the amount of data held by organizations, all statuses combined, and the number of proven unicorns on the planet (see already mentioned figure A above). Recall that a unicorn is, in the most common sense, an independent, unlisted company with an estimated capitalization of over US$ 1 billion. Thus, while the amount of information available grows exponentially, the number of structures capable of exploiting it to successfully innovate grows concomitantly. The mechanisms at work are no longer solely a matter of intuition, hard work and chance, but are increasingly based on proven processes and methods, while protecting the necessary freedom to create for individuals as for teams. In a way, the macro-trend for innovation has reached the beginning of its level of maturity, sorting out the actors equipped to last and the others.