BE 50: Innovation

Business English Lesson Fifty

Lesson Objectives

• To learn and consider some key vocabulary associated with innovation.
• To investigate how innovation is put into practice in business settings.
• To practice and apply a range of prepositions.

The Future of Business

LESSON FIFTY

Homework

Discuss the following:

• How has advertising changed over the past 50 years?
• How has advertising changed over the past 20 years?
• Is the product always the centrepiece of the advert these days?
• Have the avatars changed over time? How?

Technological Developments

• Drone postal service
• Vitamin supplement-only diets (no food)
• Solar-powered airplanes
• 3D printed body organ replacements
• Colonisation of the moon
• Cashless economies

What is innovation?

Match the Innovation Key Words

leadershipentrepreneur communication conversion network scalability change management generation culture

• the place, environment and mind-set in which change takes place.
• the person/people who drive innovation.
• the ability for innovation to be reproduced or put into practice.
• a person with ideas and the ability to realise them.
• a web of people to draw ideas, assistance or direction from.
• the manner in which a team or business prepares for and adapts to change.
• the manner in which ideas and solutions are shared among people.
• the ability to come up with something new.
• the ability to change or develop an idea into a practical or tangible result.

Discussion:

• Leadership
• Communication
• Network
• Change Management
• Culture
• Idea Generation
• Idea Conversion

Business News

These two categories together make up the so-called 'Innovation Engine'. Ideally, you want this engine to keep rotating constantly, churning out results on a regular and frequent basis. The Innovation Engine is suspended within its environment, or the 'context' of an organisational structure. Five key elements create this structure, influence it, and are therefore important to consider when talking about innovation: Leadership, Communication, Network, Change Management and Culture. Any one of these elements can act as a ‘missing link’, causing innovation to fall short. They must operate concurrently and efficiently for True Innovation to occur.

The True Innovation Model©

There are two parts to innovation: (1) The 'Content of Innovation', i.e. delivering a result through an innovation process, and (2) 'Influencing Innovation', factors that make it easier or - quite often - more difficult for people in organisations to be innovative. These factors describe the context in which innovation takes place. The 'Content of Innovation' falls again into two closely connected entities, namely: Idea Generation: a measure for how creative an organisation is; how easy it is to come up with new concepts or solutions for existing issues, often

The innovation engine should rotate constantly.

achieved by looking outside the immediate environment of the organisation. Idea Conversion: assesses how well an organisation can take existing ideas for innovation and convert them into reality; be they prototypes, new processes, organisational improvements etc.

Riccardo Weber, creator www.true-innovation.co.uk

Discussion Questions

1. What ‘influencing factors’ might make innovation in the workplace more difficult?
2. If you were to create a mathematical equation to summarise the process of innovation, what would it look like?
3. Why is it important to have all five elements of the ‘Innovation Engine’ working together for the process to succeed?

in

by

Prepositions

of

for

on

into

Can you choose an alternate preposition for any of these phrases? How does this change the meaning of the phrase?

the context which

difficult people to be innovative

the content falls two entities

the immediate environment the business

often achieved looking outside

a regular basis

Discussion

• Drone postal service
• Vitamin supplement-only diets (no food)
• Solar-powered airplanes
• 3D printed body organ replacements
• Colonisation of the moon
• Cashless economies

Homework

Consider the following and be prepared to discuss next class:

1. What does innovation look like in your workplace?
2. What part do you play in innovation?
3. In your opinion, what is the future of your company? Your industry?

Thanks!

The True Innovation Model © rights reserved by Riccardo Weber, for more info visit: www.true-innovation.co.uk