Innovative Training Programs for a Culture of Innovation
Design thinking & innovation workshops, training programs, courses, keynotes & coaching for organizations & leaders.
Working on a mindset and culture of innovation? Are you planning an innovation workshop, design thinking or brainstorming session, innovation center, initiative, or conference? Email Darin at [email protected] to see how we can help.
We are based in the US and lead workshops on-site or remotely. We offer virtual, online and in-person innovation facilitation and training with a network of trainers, facilitators, and speakers in London UK, Singapore, Germany, Australia and across the globe.
We've worked with over 100 organizations on innovation, design thinking, and leadership development programs. Companies from a variety industries have engaged with our workshops, speaker events or training programs onsite and in-person - or remotely and virtually online.
With InnovationTraining.org, we want you to find an innovation program that matches your goals. We offer on-site interactive live events to facilitate your team through step-by-step best innovation practices. These events are designed to build a more innovative and collaborative culture within your organization, along with filling your pipeline with new ideas and strategies to pursue. We also provide online courses, videos, and books - allowing you to go at your own pace. Browse our collection of programs on the site!
-Darin Eich, Ph.D.
Founder, Innovation Keynote Speaker & Design Thinking Trainer
Quotes from our clients about why their organization sought our innovation workshops, keynotes, and training programs
“Typically, being innovative in our industry can be difficult. In order to foster a culture of innovation, we want to equip our staff, at all levels, with the tools and techniques to be innovative on a daily basis. When we began the search to find someone or an entity that could do that for us, we recognized from early on that Darin was the right fit."
“My company realized that it needed an innovation wake-up call in order to stay competitive and to keep up with a number of potentially disruptive technologies that are quickly advancing inside and outside our industry. To help jump-start a more creative culture and get us moving in the right direction, we organized three teams and challenged them to “innovate in 90 days.” We asked them to propose a new program, project, or pilot that could help our company learn about new technologies and help us meet our customers changing expectations. We hoped we may get a few good ideas from this new initiative, but really wanted to see how innovative our employees could be if given a chance.”
“Darin’s approach takes the mystery out of how to think like an innovator. Whether you are wanting to become a first-time author, or focused on creating the next Internet-of-Things sensation, Darin’s approaches to innovative thinking can work to address your business challenge.”
Innovative Training for a Culture of Innovation in your Workplace: Innovative keynotes, innovation workshops, & design thinking certificate programs to guide you through innovating how you work in your organization.
Innovation Training Workshops, Activities, Programs, & Courses
We offer both in person workshops and online programs. Our digital training program is built on the activities, tools and techniques employed by innovative organizations to identify challenges, generate ideas and facilitate communication to successfully launch new innovations. While each of our programs focus on different aspects or stages of innovation, every one is designed to help you learn, develop, and progress through exposure to a wide variety of examples. We invite you to both look over our shoulder as we work through example challenges, as well as follow along and tackle the specific challenge you, your group, or your organization might face. Consider this your digital innovation facilitator. Whether you seek to develop new products and services or create a culture of innovation within your organization, our idea development process allows you to systematically tackle any challenge.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Our live keynotes & workshop topics are also available in virtual innovation program format.
Interact and be facilitated live with your group on Zoom or Teams with a realtime collaborative whiteboard like Mural or Miro.
Or, go at your own pace, be digitally facilitated, and see examples at each step with video tutorials in our online course workshops.
Innovation Training Workshops
Learn more: Email [email protected]
Our most popular Collaborative Innovation Workshops include various innovative training sessions you can pick and choose from or combine into a daylong innovation workshop. The full day agenda is designed to teach group how to collaborate, generate and develop innovative ideas, and contribute to a “culture of innovation.” We offer over 15 of our innovation workshops online.
- Workshop 1- Designing & Facilitating Idea Generation & Collaborative Development with Groups
- Workshop 2 - Collaborate, Communicate, & Create: The 3Cs of an Innovation Culture
- Workshop 3 - How to Innovate Swiftly & Systematically: Innovation Step-by-Step
- Workshop 4 - Team “Hackathon” Shark Tank Style Challenge
Get started: Email [email protected]
Design Thinking is a powerful (and fun) approach for innovation that focuses on designing for and with the people we create our products, services, and program for - the customers and users! Develop the mindset or attitude of a design thinker by completing one of our interactive workshops or online trainings in Design Thinking. Through our programs, we will help you generate and develop ideas using insight from the people you are designing for to select a project you are interested in working on and tackle it using some of the most popular and effective tools and techniques for Design Thinking.
- Online programs and toolkit of resources
- Idea generating activities in a workbook
- Team and partner activities
- Individualized presentation/workshop
Learn tools, techniques, and methods to facilitate innovation and design thinking...and train others.
Tap into our experience designing programs for over 1 million people, Ph.D. level research and knowledge to maximize learning and engagement for your students and participants. Through this comprehensive hybrid online and mentor-led course, learn to design and facilitate your own innovation and design thinking workshops, sessions, programs or courses - offer your programs to clients as an entrepreneur or within your organization as an innovation facilitator, coach, mentor, or leader.
- Get access to our proven design thinking and innovation process and activities to teach and facilitate in your own work.
- Specialized online workshops on facilitating innovation AND an online course that is the equivalent of a 3 credit university course.
- Most importantly, get two live meetings with us to receive coaching and ideas for the program you would like to design and facilitate.
- Become a part of our network and get access to future innovation facilitator training modules, updates, and special opportunities.
Cultivate your innovative thinking to change & grow through doing new and different things with impact.
The ability to innovate begins with a change in mindset - this program will walk you through how to build the self-efficacy and confidence to try new and different things in your work and life, and that you can learn how to do them even if you don't know now. Just remember, "Don't believe everything you think!" Through reflective activities, this online course will help you to cultivate a mindset for innovation through awareness of your thinking (which is both an asset and a liability). Equipped with awareness, we will then teach you techniques to change your behavior to take action faster.
Get started: Email [email protected]
This workshop is focused on helping individuals and organizations advance towards an Agile culture. This course is designed specifically to give you the basics to begin applying Agile principles influenced by a Scrum framework to your work. Ultimately, the takeaways will support you in building a culture of innovation within your organization that is not only agile, but also embraces design thinking and lean methods.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Innovate Today: Create better new products, services or program concepts in just 1 hour.
This is a blitz workshop in design, development and decisiveness. This program pushes you to ideate, conceptualize and validate ideas around a challenge immediately important to you through a series of activities. With the video tutorials serving as your facilitator, gain the tools and techniques to strategically create and communicate your way to a better business, create new products and services your customers actually want or launch your big new idea with impact.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Learn how to move forward on your innovation challenge with a project!
This online workshop is the first step to beginning and making progress on your own innovation project, showing you where to start and processes to use. While not every innovation project will result in a new product, service or business, you will develop valuable experiences and tools for tackling future challenges through this introductory program to practical innovation.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Leverage your unique strengths, skills, & assets for innovation as an individual, team, or organization
Are you using assessments or books to help you, your group, or your organization identify your strengths? Would you like to get more specific and practical - where the real value is? This program is designed to help you identify ways to innovate from your specific strengths through a series of activities. By diving deeper into your strengths, this course will help hit higher rates of success. You might even find your newfound approaches to be more fun because they directly engage more of you at your best.
Get started: Email [email protected]
How to move forward to take action on making your idea a reality
Save a lot of wasted time, effort and money by learning how to correctly validate your idea - and more - through this online program. This objective of this course is to help you understand market-fit, how to make a range of rapid or rough prototypes, how to get your first users and customers with a minimum viable product as well as how to leverage the 80/20 principle in innovation.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Expert Brainstorming and Idea Generation
The "How To" of Expert Brainstorming: Techniques and activities for generating ideas individually or in groups.
Innovate your organization with this deep training on brainstorming! This 5 hour program is the first step to making idea generation both a core competency and a competitive advantage within your organization. Cultivate strength in brainstorming for any purpose, create new products, services, and marketing campaigns and learn how to develop and facilitate brainstorming sessions and events that will generate not only innovations, but enthusiasm amongst your colleagues.
Learn about the 5 hour program here.
As a facilitator, you cannot always anticipate the exact needs of your participants. Through this online course, you will develop the tools and techniques to grow your personal flexibility and openness to be an effective facilitator, no matter what changes in the moment.
- Learn tools, techniques, and activities you can do on the fly
- Create your own toolkit of strategies, techniques, & activities to use on the spot.
- Design for the people you are facilitating...in the moment.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Design Thinking: Customer Focused Front End of Innovation
Gain customer insight with a lean design thinking approach
Customer insights are not only a great basis for innovation, they can also help you communicate and build support for your new product or ideas. Customer knowledge and empathy are the essence of the design thinking and lean startup models, and this course will give you practical tools and activities to use WITH your customers to ensure you develop products that meet real needs.
- Ways to use customer insights to identify opportunities for innovation and new product development
- Online tools and techniques useful for important steps in the innovation process, including your efforts to clarify your direction and get support for your recommendations
- Examples of how this approach works that you can experience and draw from for your own new product development process
Tips & Methods from 100 Innovator Leaders at Organizations
Innovation skills are important tools to cultivate as a professional in an organization or as an entrepreneur. But how do you learn or continue developing your innovation skills? Our online program and course on innovating at higher levels will show you how to stay on the cutting edge of innovation, allowing you to not only innovate, but help others learn how to innovate and respond to change as well. This program shares key insights from Dr. Darin Eich's interviews with over 100 innovator leaders at organizations working towards a culture of innovation - their stories and the accompanying facilitated activities are sure to engage.
Get started: Email [email protected]
How to Create & Develop Validated Ideas for New Products, Strategies, & Marketing WITH your current & potential CUSTOMERS
Get some how-to's for coming up with new ideas and developing better concepts using customer co-creation tools.
Techniques for using the voice of the customer in ideation for new products, services, strategies, or marketing.
Innovative & systematic approaches to creativity, idea development & validation…in person and online.
How to build off of consumer insights and focus groups to offer better brainstorming and innovation sessions within your organization or as a consultant.
Get started: Email [email protected]
Develop the skills, mindset, processes and action to launch focused innovation within your healthcare organization through this online program, which includes 45 minutes of video plus materials. Learning how to innovate within your healthcare organization is crucial for meeting the demands of the changing future. Follow along with a challenge you choose, like:
- Design new programs or services for specific outcomes
- Enhance specific client experience or satisfaction
- Catalyze a “culture of innovation” in your dept. or org.
- Cultivate a high-impact first three minutes with a patient
- Utilize new technology for productivity in your role
- Leverage, productize, or digitize your expertise
- Find new ways to provide value or generate revenue
- Find ways to reduce waste of money or time (no shows, charting)
- Improve efficiency or simplify processes
- Achieve regulation adaption
For the Individual
- Innovation Step-By-Step for Individuals
- Learn the basics of innovation for your life and work
- 1-hour program
For Teams & Groups 
- Program Innovation for Groups
- Built for teamwork at the unit-level
- 2.5-hour program
For the Organization
- Systematic Innovation for Organizations
- Built for your entire company, non-profit, or organization
- 5-hour program
Facilitating Groups: Teaching, Learning & Engaging
Are you bringing your innovative leadership training together through collaborative sessions or larger professional development programs? This series shares best practice techniques and tools to facilitating events and meetings to not only keep your participants engaged, but ensure they learn and accomplish more.
Facilitating Groups allows you to design interactive workshops, productive innovation sessions and engaging meetings to facilitate group discussion, activities and deliver results.
Learn about the facilitation training workshop program.
Idea Communication
Idea Communication is a leadership training workshop designed to give you strategies and techniques for memorably communicating your ideas and concepts.
Create and communicate concepts that stick! You may have generated good ideas and a great concept but then how do you communicate it so that it sticks with people?
How do you show the story so people can understand your idea and will collaborate with you as you launch into the real world?
Learn about the idea communication program or our business storytelling training workshop.
Your Program Designer & Facilitator
Dr. Darin Eich is the author of Innovation Step-by-Step and Root Down & Branch Out: Best Practices for Leadership Development Programs. Darin earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Darin is the president and co-founder of InnovationLearning.org and BrainReactions, an innovation consulting company founded by UW students, where he led idea development and innovation projects for organizations like P&G, Agilent Technologies, the United Nations, and the U.S. Council on Competitiveness.
Darin has also been a graduate student and developer of programs at the University of Maryland & William and Mary. Darin’s passion involves helping people to become themselves, find and live their strengths, and become more creative, innovative and successful leaders. Professionally, Darin does projects ranging from hundreds of college speeches to helping institutions develop leadership programs & retreats to facilitating professional brainstorm innovation sessions for the most innovative Fortune 500 companies. Darin has been a leadership program consultant to Dartmouth College, the University of Wisconsin, and USA TODAY.
Interested in discussing program ideas? Email [email protected] today. We enjoy hearing about what you are working on and appreciate the chance to create custom innovation, leadership, and design thinking programs for our clients.
Darin Eich's Innovation Training Origin Story
Testimonials about Darin’s Innovation Programs & Book
"Darin is undoubtedly one of the most energetic people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. He brings this excitement to everything he does, including his brainstorming training and facilitation.
Going through Darin's training process was like learning to ride a bike. It took several sessions to start seeing results as I was literally re-wiring my brain to pedal at speeds it had never gone before. I fell off a few times along the way, often becoming intimidated by the fast paced environment, but was always reassured by falling back on his tried-and-true methodologies. I clearly remember one session it just 'clicked' -- instead of generating 20-30 ideas in each 3 hour brainstorm, I was coming up with almost 150 ideas. I was amazed at this new found skill that previously seemed unattainable.
My newly developed ability to generate creative solutions to problems not only is applied to day-to-day activities but it also helped me differentiate myself during interview tests from a large field of Ivy League candidates to secure a job at a top Silicon Valley tech company. I'm forever thankful for the opportunity to learn this unique skill and wish I could sit around that table with Darin more often."
James Tamplin
CEO, Firebase (acquired by Google)
"Our world is changing faster than ever before. Don't let your skills stagnate! This book is like a self-study workshop that will enable you to learn systems to solve problems creatively and figure out how to lead in any life situation. I strongly recommended it.
Darin has taken the process of creativity to the level of simplicity that can be adopted by the masses. I like the focus on showing examples and using metaphors to explain things. Plus, the space and instructions provided make it feel like more than just a book. Also, the book using itself as an example and demonstration of the techniques it teaches is pure genius!"
Anand Chhatpar
Serial entrepreneur with 8 US Patents, apps with over 20 million users, named "Top 5 Young Entrepreneurs" by BusinessWeek
Darin once spoke at a leadership conference I organized in Madison. He talked about leadership in a way I'd never heard before.
It wasn't only what he said. It was also how he said it... with naked intensity and emotion and belief.
That was when I internalized that you could be passionate in a big, bold way about leading and inspiring others. It wasn't just me and my crazy friends thinking about this. "Out there in the Real World," they desperately needed more of it. Now that I'm here, I know we still need more, too.
I bought a copy. I can think of several friends who might do well to get one as well.
Michael Williams
Founder, Mementum Marketing
“Innovation is a critical ingredient for success in today’s work environment. Being able to innovate allows you (and your company) to stay ahead of the game instead of constantly playing catch-up. In this book, Darin outlines an easy-to-follow process that will help you develop your ability to think innovatively and create tangible results.”
Dr. Jené Kapela
Principal/Founder, Jené Kapela Leadership Solutions, LLC