In a difficult climate for business, applied education is a key way to gain advantage over competitors. You hire the best people you can. Education allows them to perform at their best for you.
Choosing among the plethora of IP focused education offerings can be difficult. If you are looking to promote ‘out of the box’ thinking, holistic approaches and empower employees our recommendation and practice is to focus on courses that train participants for realistic judgment and strategic decision making and try to avoid out of the box training programs that are not customizable to you and your company.
As the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu said: “If you tell me I will listen, if you show me I will see. But if you let me experience I will learn”. To get the most out of the IP course it is important that the learning experience be put into the context of your business and focused on solving a specific problem or reaching a concrete goal. An action based course will allow the participants to immediately grasp the value in the learning experience and clearly understand how their actions or inactions will affect the overall goal/aim.
With the proper guidance from the course facilitators, internalizing the fundamentals of strategy excellence and decision making tools in this way will allow for further repetition of thinking process under different circumstances. This can in turn have positive effect on the sense of development and fulfillment of your employees; improve their working outcome and increasing the return on investment for the company and its shareholders. After all, IP has no intrinsic value unless it is managed by people able recognize and take advantage the strategic opportunities it offers.
Image credit: Paolo Camera