The Innovative Edge accomplishes team building by working with your teams to find innovative solutions to actual business challenges that affect them directly. Because the issues are real, the teamwork and team skills continue back on the job.

• Teambuilding activities done for their own sake rarely stick.
  You've seen all the approaches for encouraging teamwork - the obstacle courses, field trips, teambuilding games, puzzles to solve. And still, teams return to business as usual once they're back on the job.
  
  
• Real team building occurs when prescribed behaviors lead to tangible benefits, not simply good feelings.
  Our teambuilding activities involve real, business-related tasks, in which each person has a stake. Challenges that require creative thinking. True collaboration occurs because it has to in order for the team to invent an innovative solution. Teamwork and innovation go hand-in-hand!
  
  
• Since the outcome directly affects each person, new team skills are much more likely to be repeated back at work.
  Nothing reinforces behavior like success on the job!
  

Our employee development programs are designed on the same principle. As part of the pre-work, participants are asked to frame one or two problems or opportunities they are faced with, for which they're seeking new ideas. These become the "cases" used in the course for practicing behaviors and skills that constitute high performance teamwork.

At the National Research Council (Canada), we trained groups of engineers and scientists in the principles of innovation and teamwork, in a traditionally non-collaborative culture. Sessions yielded dozens of new ideas for achieving closer partnerships with the industries they serve.

"Among the group we gathered for this, there were a number who were somewhat skeptical of engaging in such a creative process. By the end, however, all were quite enthusiastic and felt the time was well spent."
- Dr. Peter Schlichtiger, Director of e-Commerce, Dresdner Bank AG

To find out how we might build high-performing teams at your company, contact us now!

The Innovative Edge, Inc.
Ph: 508-497-9096
Fx: 508-435-8170