Five days. One live challenge. A credible case for action.
A practical innovation programme powered by AI, built around the work your organisation needs to move forward.
The challenge becomes the classroom.
Strategic priorities lose momentum when the problem is poorly framed, evidence is scattered and teams cannot show leaders what to do next. The Innovation Mini MBA gives people a disciplined way to make progress.
Bring a real organisational challenge. Over five intensive days, cross-functional teams explore the opportunity, understand the people affected, develop and prototype solutions, test their most important assumptions, and present a clear recommendation. They leave with stronger innovation skills and a 90-day plan for the next decision.
Participants connect the disciplines that make innovation work: strategy and opportunity selection, customer and stakeholder insight, design thinking and Google Sprint methods, Lean Startup experimentation, business model innovation, venture building, financial logic, risk, storytelling and change. They practise the methods together, then learn how to use AI to move faster and work with greater range.
The result is a shared way of working that people use long after the five days are over.
Every day produces something the team needs for its final recommendation.
Frame the opportunity
What problem is worth solving, for whom, and why now?
Teams start with the organisation's challenge and work backwards from the outcome it needs. They examine the current situation, map stakeholders and constraints, identify where value is being lost, and define what success would look like. A broad ambition becomes a focused question they can investigate and act on.
Discover what matters
What do people, processes and evidence reveal?
Teams gather insight from the people closest to the challenge: customers, employees, partners or other stakeholders. They use interviews, observation and available data to understand needs, friction, workarounds and the jobs people are trying to get done. They identify the assumptions that could change the direction of the work.
Create and prototype
Which solution is worth making tangible?
Teams develop a range of possible responses before selecting a promising direction. They shape the proposition, explore how it could work in practice, and build a prototype people can react to. Depending on the challenge, that might be a service journey, an improved process, a digital interface, an AI assistant, a new proposition or a venture concept.
Test and build the case
What evidence would justify the next investment?
Teams put the concept in front of relevant people where access permits. They design focused experiments, gather feedback, examine feasibility and identify what would have to be true for the idea to work. They weigh value, costs, risks, operating requirements and the measures that would show whether a pilot succeeds.
Pitch and mobilise
What should the organisation do next?
Teams bring their work together in a leadership-ready recommendation. They demonstrate the prototype, explain what they learned, show where the evidence is strong or incomplete, and make a specific request for the next decision. They prepare a 90-day plan covering ownership, experiments, resources, measures and decision points.
AI is woven through the entire journey.
Participants experience a range of AI capabilities in the context of work they are actually doing. The programme adapts to the AI tools your organisation has approved.
Research and intelligence
Explore the landscape, interrogate documents and check sources.
Insight and analysis
Organise qualitative evidence, analyse data and identify patterns.
Creative development
Generate and challenge ideas, write concepts and create visual or multimedia materials.
Prototyping
Build interfaces, workflows, demonstrations and early versions of AI-enabled services.
Testing and decision support
Analyse feedback, examine scenarios, model assumptions and prepare experiments.
Execution
Create reusable prompts, specialised assistants and governed agentic workflows that help teams continue the work.
Responsible use is part of the method. Protect confidential material, verify consequential claims, document assumptions and keep human judgement with the people who own the decision.
What participants will be able to do.
They will also leave with a practical understanding of which types of AI help at each stage, what those tools can get wrong, and how to build useful AI-supported workflows into their own roles.
- Frame a complex organisational challenge as a focused opportunity for action.
- Find and assess evidence about customer, employee or stakeholder needs.
- Generate, select and prototype solutions using innovation methods and AI.
- Design rapid experiments that reduce the most important uncertainty.
- Assess a concept's value, feasibility, risks and route to adoption.
- Present a credible recommendation and lead the next stage of work.
What your organisation takes away.
Progress on a priority
Each team applies its learning to an organisational challenge and produces a tangible concept, prototype and recommendation.
A stronger decision
Sponsors can see the problem definition, evidence gathered, assumptions still open, risks and proposed next step in one place.
Capability that stays
Participants gain methods, prompts and working practices they can reuse to investigate opportunities and run future innovation work.
A route from workshop to action
The final 90-day plan names the experiments, owners, measures and decision points needed to keep momentum.
Leaders and teams responsible for finding better ways.
Serving customers, improving operations, developing new propositions or delivering strategic change. Participants do not need prior innovation training or advanced technical skills.
- Innovation, digital, product and change teams.
- Functional leaders and high-potential managers with complex challenges to solve.
- Cross-functional groups that need a shared approach and faster decisions.
- Organisations developing an internal network of innovation practitioners.
What a cohort might do.
An organisation wants to reduce the time its teams spend resolving a recurring customer problem.
A cohort maps the current journey, interviews frontline staff and customers, identifies the most costly points of friction and builds a prototype of a better service and AI-supported workflow. The team tests the critical steps, estimates the likely value and implementation effort, and presents a scoped pilot with measures for success.
The challenge, solution and AI tools will differ by organisation. The discipline remains the same: understand the problem, make the idea tangible, gather evidence and recommend the next decision.
Short inputs, facilitated teamwork, daily presentations.
The five days combine short expert inputs, facilitated teamwork, AI practice, stakeholder engagement, coaching and daily presentations. Teams build their final case as they go. The programme is designed for an in-person cohort and can be adapted for live online delivery where required.
Before the programme, we work with the sponsor to choose a challenge that matters, agree the boundaries and identify the people who can provide insight and feedback. Access to stakeholders, relevant information and an end-of-week sponsor discussion makes the learning more valuable and the final recommendations more actionable.
The programme draws on Innovation Network's experience helping teams in large organisations apply innovation, facilitation and AI to real work across banking, telecoms, government and defence.
Bring us a challenge worth solving.
In five days, your people can build a sharper understanding of the problem, a tangible solution, the evidence gathered so far, and a practical plan for what happens next.