This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Companies do not lack ideas. They lack a way of turning an idea into a changed process, and a way of remembering what they already tried.

So the same suggestion is made every eighteen months, by someone new, and dies at the same point every time.

Where innovation actually breaks

Ideas are generated in workshops and then handed to a process that was designed for something else, so the idea is what gets modified. Nobody framed the problem before solving it, which means several people are solving different problems in the same room. The tools available are brainstorming and enthusiasm, which fail on any contradiction that has no obvious compromise.

And when a team disbands, everything they learned leaves with them, because it was never captured anywhere a future team would look.

A company that built it in, and a method for hard problems

Thirty-eight lessons. Eight on how Google institutionalised this: structured selection, hiring committees and the two kinds of error, orientation and learning culture, OKR and the autonomy question, internal mobility, transparency, twenty percent time, treating mistakes as data, and people analytics. Their innovation output is the result of that machinery rather than of hiring unusually creative people.

Then ten on structured problem solving. Framing with 5W1H, SCQA and MECE trees. Root cause analysis with Five Whys and Ishikawa, including how to confirm a cause is real. Pareto and Theory of Constraints. SCAMPER, Six Thinking Hats, morphological analysis and the focal object method. TRIZ with the Ideal Final Result and Altshuller's forty principles, for contradictions that appear to have no compromise. Group facilitation with nominal group technique and Delphi. And the standard frameworks with guidance on which fits which problem.

Process, participation and memory

Then eight on process optimisation, because an idea meets the old process long before it meets the market: waste, standardisation, maturity, five types of process map, improvement frameworks, process architecture, and the full tool set from 5S and 8D through SIPOC, DRIVE and ICOR to prioritisation matrices — plus how a culture of improvement is actually built.

Then six on gamification, which is the practical answer to voluntary participation: mechanics for attraction, onboarding, recognition, culture and learning, including the options that need no platform and no budget.

And six on knowledge management, which is what stops the organisation relearning the same lesson: capture methods, wikis and ontologies, communities of practice, retrospectives, effectiveness indices, and a strategy that survives staff turnover.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals — a games company among them, where the difference between a mechanic that produces participation and one that produces resentment is not theoretical.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

Start with the memory problem

Ask whether anyone in your organisation has tried the thing you are about to try. Then ask where you would look to find out. In most companies there is no answer to the second question, and that alone explains a large part of why progress feels circular. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.