Our Approach

The Notre Dame Futures Group partners with teams and organizations to create an internal culture of innovation. We can help you build an environment that attracts and rewards new knowledge, values honest communication, prizes fresh thinking, and lets every team member realize their full potential. Together, we can teach your team the Innovative Mindset, and build a practice of creative problem solving using our proprietary Strategic Innovation Methodology.

What Sets Us Apart

Our unique approach isn’t the only innovation process in the market, but it sets itself apart in a few unique ways.

• It was developed with business leaders, innovation experts, and a multi-disciplinary team of Notre Dame’s faculty.

• It synthesizes and streamlines other methodologies into a flexible framework you can use to make big decisions and bring your future to life.

• It’s a marriage of mindset and tools, the result of which is a repeatable, scalable path to generating new, breakthrough ideas.

• It begins with a full landscape analysis, grounding your solution in the realities of the market, your industry, and your organization.

How We Chart Our Impact

Stewardship and Sustainability are our two guiding lights, and in honoring and measuring both, we ensure that we and our partners are having a positive impact on society and the planet.

Stewardship is the careful oversight of resources—people, finances, time, facilities, and technology—and ensuring that all of them are used effectively.

Sustainability means building solutions with long-term viability, balancing current needs with future impacts on the environment, society, and the economy.

Because we embrace a triple bottom line, we’re dedicated to help our partners adopt practices that are responsible and forward-thinking, ensuring that their operations and businesses are sustainable and resources are managed wisely for future generations. Most importantly, we measure the impact of these approaches, which means that our partner organizations can actually quantify and assess their economic, social, and environmental impact.

How it Works

Our Approach to Innovation has two parts which, when set in motion together, do more than simply help you come up with new ideas or make difficult decisions. They foster a true culture of innovation, one that gives teams the mindset and practical know-how to punch through outmoded ways of doing business and uncover opportunities to build a stronger solution and a better world.

The Innovative Mindset

An Innovative Mindset is a way of thinking that opens possibilities and maximizes the usefulness of resources to create positive change. It combines curiosity, an openness to new ideas, and creative problem-solving with a vision for the future.

One of the most effective ways to unlock the power of creative problem-solving is by developing an Innovative Mindset. At the Notre Dame Futures Group, we partner with organizations to help them build not just the mindset, but full cultures of innovation. The key pieces are the Innovative Mindset and our Strategic Innovation Methodology. Taken together, they open up new worlds and give teams the tools to own their futures.

The Key Elements of an Innovative Mindset

The first step to embracing organizational innovation is opening your mind to new possibilities. Synthesizing decades of experience, academic and industrial research and thought leadership, the Notre Dame Futures Group has identified the six key elements of the Innovative Mindset.

 

Embrace the Innovative Mindset

Innovation can be a fragile thing, requiring just the right balance of safety and risk, inquiry and reflection, understanding and influence. Team and organizational cultures that don’t create the right environment for new ideas are doing more than hindering innovation, they’re likely stifling their people in all kinds of ways.

In our course "Unlocking the Innovative Mindset" you’ll learn the deep why behind our approach. You’ll see the nuance and intention that creates an innovative culture, and you’ll learn how to foster it on your own team. A culture is more than a set of tools, it’s the shared norms, language, habits, and impulses of the group. When you dive into the Innovative Mindset, you’ll learn more than how to boost your creativity, you’ll unlock a new, more open, more enriching organizational culture.

Learn more about the course

Learn to Use our Insight Lenses

One of the key practices you’ll learn as you embrace the Innovative Mindset is to look at the world, each other, and your big challenges through an Insight Lens. Understanding your challenge and your context from different angles is critical for finding new breakthrough opportunities. Using various Insight Lenses enable us to break mental frameworks relating to our business or organization.

Strategic Innovation Methodology

The Strategic Innovation Methodology is a framework incorporating the best tools and practices, aimed at providing leadership with the confidence to make strategic innovation decisions.

The Strategic Innovation methodology is a structured, yet flexible, process designed to prompt out-of-the-box thinking and spark creativity. Designed with business leaders, innovation experts, and a multi-disciplinary team of Notre Dame’s faculty, we instill a clear, repeatable path to new, scalable solutions. It’s a comprehensive approach that integrates the world's most effective innovation tools into a single framework for creative problem-solving and decision-making.

If the Innovative Mindset is the theory, then our Strategic Innovation Methodology is the practice.

Identify
Our methodology begins by assessing the environment and choosing a focus area based on organizational strategy and the realities of your business.

Inquire
Next, you'll take a real challenge from your focus area, frame it as an open-ended question, and work to discover hidden insights that suggest new solutions.

Imagine
In this phase, you’ll learn how to synthesize your different ideas into concepts and explore how to bring them to life.

Iterate
Finally, we’ll show you how to refine your concept and design a specific, testable offering, all within the capabilities and strategy of your organization.

Learn our Methodology

There is a variety of ways we teach the Innovative Mindset and our Strategic Innovation Methodology. They range from a guided video series to virtual learning sessions, to full-team, multi-day workshops.

To learn more about building your own culture of innovation, contact the Notre Dame Futures Group at futuresgroup@nd.edu.