In the real world, coming up with a breakthrough idea doesn’t mean it will get to market. By nature, innovative ideas are different and represent new ways of thinking. Getting stakeholders to recognize the value of these market-shaking ideas, buy into and support them, and agree to build them, requires a new kind of design skill: facilitation. This session will show how leading innovation workshops (collaborative design workshops) not only brings UX to the strategy table, but it invents a new table at which strategic ideation and dialog can take place constructively. In this session, two designers will show how they have lead very different types of innovation workshops to generate creative new ideas, get stakeholders aligned around those ideas, and drive those innovations to market. They will share their favorite methods for getting cross-functional groups to ideate, filter ideas using the innovation funnel, and align organizations around a common vision for breakthrough evolution. They will also post instructions for conducting successful innovation workshops.
Carola Fellenz Thompson is a passionate leader of user experience design teams and speaker and author on User Experience Management, Innovation and Design Thinking. She has over fifteen years of experience designing and leading the design of the user experiences of a broad range of products and services in the enterprise, consumer and tool spaces.
Carola is currently Senior Director of User Experience for Mindjet, the leading provider of information mapping tools. She and her team are responsible for product design and user research for Mindjet’s suite of products. Prior to joining Mindjet she held management and design positions at firms including SAP,Openwave, Onebox.com, Sun Microsystems, Objective Systems Integrators (now Agilent Technologies) and IntelliCorp.
Jim Nieters is Senior Director of User Experience Design in the Industry Software Services division at Hewlett Packard. Jim leverages design to drive innovations that differentiate the business. He moved to HP three weeks ago, and before this, led multiple CEO-level initiatives at Yahoo, which required him to lead cross-functional teams that identify and align the organization around a transformative goal. Before Yahoo!, Jim built and led Cisco’s central User Experience group, which tracked annual revenue increases in the tens of millions of dollars based on innovation and design. He has been a design practitioner for 15 years, and a leader for more than ten. Jim writes a regular column on management of user experience and speaks frequently at conferences and universities on innovation and leading design organizations.
