Fire Up Innovation with Helene Cahen

Your Working Life with Caroline Dowd-Higgins

Website: www.FireUpInnovation.com

Helene Cahen, MS, is an innovation strategist, trainer, facilitator, and speaker with over 20 years of experience helping companies navigate innovation challenges. She is the founder and principal consultant at Fire Up Innovation Consulting (previously Strategic Insights), where she guides Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and non-profits to understand innovation, create innovative new products/services, build effective teams, and support a user-centered culture.

Cahen has been a facilitator and lecturer for the University of California Haas School of Business and is now coaching in their Executive Program. She was also the vice president of innovation for a startup and worked in and for package goods corporations in the beginning of her career. She is in demand as a speaker on the topic of design thinking and creativity, and recently did a TEDx talk on high-performance collaboration for teams.

Trained in creative problem solving and design thinking, Cahen received an MS in Creativity and Change Leadership from the Center for Applied Imagination at the State University of New York (SUNY) Buffalo. She also has a business degree from Sciences Po Paris, a prestigious French business school. Born and raised in Paris, Cahen lives in Berkeley, California, with her family.

SPARK AND SUSTAIN HIGH-PERFORMING INNOVATION TEAMS

Innovation Is Iterative, Messy, And Nonlinear, Says Leading Innovation Strategist

Today’s challenges – whether individual, business-focused, or collective world problems – are complex. Solving them requires diverse skills and thinking, but also a common understanding of thinking processes. To create change, to adapt, and to innovate in organizations requires teamwork. Typically, teams are brought together because of their experiences, functional expertise, and background. Yet, they often don’t have a formal understanding and knowledge of how to work together as a team, particularly in high-stakes situations like innovation.

In FIRE UP INNOVATION: Sparking And Sustaining Innovation Teams, innovation consultant and strategist Helene Cahen provides a roadmap to support a journey of learning and a practice of new thinking and risk-taking. The book, with its multi-color energizing design, contains the keys to a self-guided journey to understanding one’s own creativity and developing innovation techniques, language, and tools to collaborate and innovate with others more easily and successfully.

Based on Cahen’s extensive experience working with organizations large and small, FIRE UP INNOVATION:

· Outlines practical ways to support and sustain high-performing innovation teams

· Stresses the importance of diversity in driving innovation

· Explores AI’s role in the innovation process

· Features actionable practices, including a five-week challenge

Cahen, whose expertise is in developing innovation teams, has seen firsthand how teams often lack a common process, tools, and language to be able to work together effectively. This often starts with teams not being aware of their diversity of thinking, particularly the different ways people solve problems, which can create friction and frustration.

Innovation is a learning journey. There’s no way to predict what can or will happen while moving through the process, and what we learn informs what we need to do next. Thinking about innovation as nonlinear helps adopt a mindset of being open to whatever may happen.

Here are the characteristics of an effective innovation process:

· Start by understanding the environment and the challenges at hand.

· Coming up with ideas (which is the easiest part of the process). The before (defining the right problem) and after (developing and implementing the ideas) are more challenging.

· Integrate users throughout.

· Be flexible, since the challenge itself may evolve and the solutions may not work, forcing the need to backtrack.

Exploring the unique ways of thinking and solving problems, addressing how teams operate, and providing practical frameworks and tools that can enhance teamwork, FIRE UP INNOVATION will instill greater awareness of how individuals and teams think, create, and innovate, and in the process make work easier, more effective, more collaborative, and, ultimately, more fulfilling.

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