CLIC Hosts Lunch and Learn with Caroline Cooksey

On Feb. 6, 2017, the Center for Leadership, Innovation, and Change (CLIC) at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business hosted a lunch and learn for MBA students featuring Caroline Cooksey, VP of Data and Research Operations at CCMI focused on managing and leading innovation.

Cooksey and students talked about challenges in leading innovation centered around customers, results, change management, and sustainability of change. A few takeaways from Cooksey were:

Customers:

“Customers are the key to innovation. When you really listen to their annoyances, frustrations, or unhappiness with your product/services, you are left with a reservoir of potential new solutions.”

Results:

“I think of innovation in terms of the results and not the bells and whistles. Did I save someone time, reduce their costs, improve their accuracy, or allow them to do something that they couldn’t do before?”

Change:

“Innovation and change often go hand in hand.  While it is easy to be a proponent of new ideas/change, the difficulty is when change takes us out of our comfort zone. To overcome resistance or apathy, the effort must be top-down, bottom-up, and sideways.”

Sustainability:

“Innovation has to be sustainable; otherwise it was a quick fix.”