Transforming a Culture of Innovation at a Leading Telecommunications Provider

Industry: Large Canadian Telecommunications Company

Project: To create a culture of innovation using KLI’s Design Thinking Programs

The Challenge

As one of the largest telecommunications companies in Canada embarked on a transformation to also become a leading-edge technology services provider, they recognized a need to increase their innovation capabilities. They made the decision to invest in their people with training experiences that would develop their creative confidence and enhance their toolkit for innovation to flourish across the organization.

The Partnership Approach

We partnered with the Learning and Development team and several key Executives across the organization who are involved with leading innovation to understand the importance for driving innovation across the organization as well as their strategic objectives.

KLI’s Competitive Advantage

Our competitive advantage as a partner in talent development is that we are also business professionals who ensure all training experiences connect back to the client’s context for immediate application and ROI. Our team of design thinking facilitators are extremely experienced in real-world design thinking experience, engaging facilitation and bilingual (English and French) capability.

The Solution

The Company prioritized design thinking training for their new graduates, professionals across the nation, high potential leaders and their executives. This strategic move aimed to enhance their ability to develop solutions that would significantly improve the lives of their customers and employees.

Our Design Thinking Programming

Design thinking is a creative problem-solving process focused on end-users/customers and what is most important to them. Through empathy, collaboration, and inclusive practices, we learn how to innovate in ways that ensure desirability of our products and services now and into the future. Design thinking includes: Human Centred Design (HCD), Service Design, User Experience (UX) / User Interface (UI).

Our Design Thinking programs are action-packed learning experiences that build innovation capability for all functions of the organization. Traditional problem solving is often straightforward, but not always innovative nor effective. In these programs, we challenge our assumptions and learn more about the customer to really understand the right problems to solve. We help our participants build the right behaviours and mindset at all levels to ensure a collective shift in culture towards innovation at scale. These include:

• Introduction to Design Thinking: Learn Design Thinking fundamentals
• Design Thinking Lite: Learn the Design Thinking Fundamentals and our 9-step framework of DT Methods
• Design Thinking Challenge: Learn our 9-step framework of DT Methods that teams will apply to a real business challenge and see a DT process from end to end
• Design Thinking 2.0: Develop a more sophisticated understanding of how Design Thinking is implemented & applied in the current context and workflows
• Leading Innovation: Develop the leadership behaviours and conditions required to build a culture of innovation

The programs leverage our Design Thinking Map™ which is a 9-step process we created for professionals to work through a business challenge, apply the design thinking methods, and ultimately generate an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

In many of our programs we also use the ExperierencePoint Aware simulation that creates a highly engaging way for participants to learn the 6 creative habits of design thinkers – asking How Might We Questions, learning about extreme users, creative brainstorming, idea selection, prototyping and testing.