• Clarifies the much desired, but seldom developed, capability of innovation
• Sets your credit union apart from the rest of the industry which does not generally encourage innovation
• Focuses innovation and creative thinking toward the key areas of need within the organization
• Gives each participant a completely new “set of tools” for thinking about challenges, seeing opportunities and solving problems
• Interactively addresses how to think in terms of “dynamic complexity” and creates resultant plans
• Uncovers a wide range of new questions the group should be asking as the organization moves forward

Innovation planning is the uniquely designed process of extending innovative thinking throughout a leadership team and applying the creative approach of innovation to create new-to-industry “solutions.”

The process of innovation-planning initiates and develops an innovative style of thinking within all of the organization’s leadership. It enables leaders to recombine people, ideas and objects in unique ways to generate new value offerings for the organization. For example: amid the novel interactions of innovation planning, the management might create a start-up loan product for younger members that bases underwriting on relevant transaction histories, rather than credit history and scores.

Innovation feeds into the secondary and tertiary strategies of an organization to become the organization's competitive DNA. This becomes the organization’s “secret sauce.”

Throughout innovation planning, Nice Enterprises, Inc. will guide you through the process of understanding the qualities of innovators. We guide you to conceive innovations that will become your new value offerings. Through innovation assessment on business life-cycle and operational capabilities, we will focus the innovation work in the right areas. Using research-based exercises, the group will create strategically aligned secondary strategies in areas as broad as your business model and as focused as your service quality. These outcomes will be aligned using the organization’s strategy drivers that were established in Strategic Planning.

The group will also undertake the unique dialogue and thinking processes required to build a wider perspective on overcoming credit union challenges.

In many of the engagements we facilitate, we use a unique exercise called Competency Innovation that turns the organization’s competencies into novel value offerings and result in a competitive difference. Competency Innovation is the process of refining your organization’s winning actions (competencies) into “ingredients,” then combining those in novel ways to create a competitive difference.