Webinar | Innovation Design Thinking

EPISODE 4: Innovation design thinking. A series of six webinars enabling you to reposition, reskill and reshape your organisation, for business success right now, and for future agility.

Join Dr Imran Zawwar, Lecturer in Strategic Management, as he looks into the 'Design Thinking' approach to innovation and problem solving. This one hour webinar is part four of a series of six Cranfield webinars enabling you to reposition, reskill and reshape your organisation, for business success right now, and for future agility.  

Dr Zawwar shared pragmatic perspectives on fostering innovation within your organisation. He highlighted that the current crisis has created an increasingly competitive and challenging environment when every business leader is gazing hopefully to unlock new opportunities because they realise there is business as usual, no more!

He explored the definition of 'new' when it comes to innovation. He reminded us that simple incremental, me-too solutions will not make the cut and radical innovation is needed to ensure survival. However he warned against doing something new, 'just because I can'. He described how innovation has to be intrinsically linked to value creation. He took us through the key factors which hold back innovation.

The webinar was interactive throughout, using several digital tools enabling the participants to share their ideas and opinions within the session, as well as posing questions for him to answer. A true innovator, Dr Zawwar used new webinar software with which he had only become familiar two days previously. You can imagine how scary it can be for organisers of a webinar when the speaker wants to use something for the very first time in a live webinar with over 100 participants! But in keeping with his ethics, Dr Zawwar was using it because he felt it would add value, so it was worth us taking the risk. Judging by the positive feedback in response to the exciting and engaging way Dr Zawwar shared his thinking, the risk we took together certainly added value to the experience.

Organisations have been forced to implement new ways of working in the current pandemic. Employees are having to rapidly adjust and learn new skills. Many organisations are finding their values and culture are becoming prominent in the public eye.

Many organisations are fighting to survive. Others are also grappling with the question “How can we learn from this experience and ensure that we, and our workforce emerge from Covid-19 better placed to respond to the next crisis?

McKinsey & Company wrote an insightful article which contained six pragmatic steps to help organisations address aspects of this question.

This prompted us to create a series of six interconnected one-hour webinars, each one of which resonates with one of the six McKinsey steps, and draws upon our faculty expertise and experience to help you ensure your organisation survives and thrives post-Covid 19.

Featuring expert faculty and partner organisations share their thinking and ideas in interactive sessions designed to support your journey through this pandemic and beyond.

Episode 1: Discovering your strategy for thriving in a the new world
Professor Andrey Pavlov, Cranfield School of Management
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Episode 2: Prospering post Covid-19 crisis: What leaders need to be and do
Paul Surridge, Principal Consultant, Mercuri Urval
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Episode 3: Delivering customised learning in today’s virtual world
David Deegan, Graham Bell, Dr Imran Zawwar, Cranfield Executive Development
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Episode 4: Innovation design thinking
Dr Imran Zawwar, Cranfield School of Management
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Episode 5: Think big, act small
Stephen Carver, Cranfield School of Management
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Episode 6: Business transformation: A story of emergence in a sea of ambiguity
Mark Threlfall, Cranfield School of Management
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