WINN – Workouts for innovation leaders

Working out leaders’ minds

The recent crisis due to Covid-19 has definitely proven (if anyone still had any doubt about it) that companies – SMEs especially – must be able to adapt and innovate their products and services in order to stay competitive on nowadays markets. Why SMEs especially? Because, unlike the big companies, who have dedicated budgets and R&D compartments, SMEs most often struggle in this area since they have less employees and they are not all that connected with the new technologies (some of them are even very low or no-tech at all).

We, the international team formed around the Erasmus+ project WINN – Workouts for innovation leaders, believe that SME managers and leaders must be the ones to set the tone in this direction. They must work continuously towards developing and keeping an innovation-oriented mindset for themselves and for their teams. They should focus on making sure that their teams are aware and in line with the company goals and that they ready and able to take on responsibilities and get involved with idea-generation, observation and decision-making processes.

Following the innovation trend ourselves, we have focused on helping leaders lead towards innovation and spread an innovation culture throughout their organisations through practicing and acquiring good habits that aim at the development of innovation-oriented behaviours and mindset. Like a good workout, but one for the mind.

Based on the cue-routine-reward system of creating and acquiring a good habit, we have developed a set of 12 practices per each of the areas that we have identified as important for SME leaders to “work out” in order to become more open minded and better prepared to lead their teams toward innovation: innovation mindset, emotional intelligence, leadership style, collaborative behaviours, critical thinking, overcoming biases in decision-making processes. All the “workouts” are gathered in an interactive mobile app that is almost ready to be tested in 6 different languages (English, Romanian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese and German) by SME managers and leaders in the six countries involved in the project, hopefully with the best of results! Stay tuned to be among the first ones to test our app!

We are here:

https://www.facebook.com/WINNEUProject

https://www.linkedin.com/company/winneuproject/