Innovation & Improvement
Designing & Running Innovation Labs and Hackathons
From framing the challenge to adopting the winning solution — running an innovation event that ends in projects, not photographs.
Practitioner3 days18 training hours8-20 participants
All training programmes are accredited by the Sharjah Private Education Authority.
Programme objectives
- Turn a broad problem into a solvable challenge question
- Design the agenda and pick the facilitation tools
- Build transparent judging criteria that survive scrutiny
- Run rapid prototyping and cheap solution testing
- Secure the adoption path for the winner after the event ends
Detailed agenda
1
Day 1
The challenge and the design
- Why most innovation events fail: the badly framed challenge
- Problem-framing tools and writing the challenge question
- Lab or hackathon: matching format to purpose
- Building the agenda and selecting participants
2
Day 2
Facilitation and prototyping
- Divergent and convergent generation tools
- Managing mixed teams and productive disagreement
- Rapid prototyping with simple materials
- Testing an idea with a real user inside an hour
3
Day 3
Judging and adoption
- Building judging criteria and their weights
- Running the final pitch and the panel
- From winning to a project with an owner and a budget
- Measuring the event's return and documenting it as award evidence
Competencies developed
- Problem framing
- Facilitation
- Design thinking
- Event management
- Judging
What participants take away
- A step-by-step innovation lab run-book
- Templates: challenge brief, agenda, judging criteria, scoring sheet
- A facilitation toolkit indexed by lab stage
- An accredited certificate of attendance
Prerequisites
None. Bringing a real challenge from your organisation to work on is preferred.
How it is assessed
A group deliverable: a complete run-book for a real lab or hackathon, presented and challenged on day three.
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