
Customer Obsession
Customers are the foundation of every business. To ensure you succeed, in this section, you will explore customer-focus versus shareholder-focus.
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In this training, you will
- Learn the difference between the customer-focus and shareholder-focus.
- Deep dive into Amazon’s customer obsession that made them one of the most successful companies in human history.
- Explore how Bonobos, Warby Parker and Casper used customer obsession to differentiate and scale
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Customer Obsession
- Customer Focus
- Innovator’s DNA = Data, Not Assumptions
- Deeper understanding of Amazon's success

Data, Not Assumptions (Dna)
Customer data is the fuel for the most modern, successful, valuable, scalable and fastest growing businesses: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google (Alphabet) and Microsoft.
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In this training, you will
- Learn the Innovator’s Mindset of “Data, Not Assumptions”.
- Learn the extremely valuable lesson that data and credibility are extremely valuable, and correlated.
- Learn the role of data in increasing your chances of success as an entrepreneur, executive, employee, student and human.
- Learn how Big Tech uses data to accelerate their growth and reduce risk by diversifying, deepening and fortifying their knowledge of the customer.
- Review the role data will play as you walk through HowDo’s innovation process.
- Learn when you achieve “data saturation”.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Innovator’s Mindset
- Credibility
- Discipline
- Resilience
- Growth Mindset

Learning Mindset
To succeed in innovation, you must adopt a growth mindset and prepare yourself to learn. To help you build the right mindset, you will explore some of the barriers to learning and how you can work to overcome them.
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In this training, you will
- Learn the importance of continuous learning
- Learn that learning is a marathon, not a sprint
- Learn that the knowledge you gain from learning is the foundation of any success you hope to achieve
- Research how continuous learning is the foundation of Big Tech’s success
- Review the barriers that prevent us from learning
- Explore some mental models that you can use to overcome barriers to learning
- Explore activities that you can engage in to optimize your learning
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Learning Mindset
- Continuous Learning
- Knowledge Matrix
- Beginner's Mind

Customer
You will dive deep into your customer to increase the chances of your business’ success while reducing the risk of your new idea.
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In this training, you will
- Develop a deep, accurate and precise understanding of your customer.
- Learn how to use secondary research to generally understand your customer.
- Learn how to use qualitative and quantitative research to precisely understand your customer.
- Learn who the customer thinks your competitors are
- Learn how to choose your customer
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Customer Obsession
- Documenting what you learn
- Finding and interpreting 3rd party data
- Communicating with customers
- Qualitative customer research
- Quantitative customer research
- Focus
- Attention to detail
- Listening to the customer
- Removing yourself from the solution

Competition
You will deep dive into the competitive landscape to understand how your competition is currently winning,
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In this training, you will
- Develop a deep, accurate and precise understanding of your competition.
- Learn how to use secondary research to generally understand your competition.
- Learn how to use qualitative and quantitative research to precisely understand your competition.
- Learn how to use qualitative and quantitative research to precisely understand your competitor’s customer.
- Identify the type of competitors you are facing and their respective capabilities, strengths and weaknesses.
- Determine in which markets your solution will operate so that you can effectively analyze the market in the next step.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Competitive analysis
- Customer obsession
- Finding and interpreting 3rd party data
- Documenting what you learn
- Identifying alternative and substitutes
- Communicating with competitor employees
- Qualitative competitor research
- Quantitative competitor research
- Focus
- Attention to detail
- Listening to the competition
- Removing yourself from the solution

Market
Together we will develop a precise understanding of your market(s) and its dynamics. This will allow you to make an informed decision on any possible business opportunities.
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In this training, you will
- Develop a thorough understanding of the market(s) where you can compete in and its dynamics.
- Reflect on how to assess a business opportunity within a market.
- Challenge the sources’ credibility (from primary and secondary research) and their assumptions on the market analysis data.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Customer Obsession
- Competitive Analysis
- Finding and interpreting 3rd party data
- Documenting what you learn
- Identifying alternative and substitutes
- Communicating with competitor employees
- Qualitative competitor research
- Quantitative competitor research
- Focus
- Attention to detail
- Listening to the competition
- Listening to the customer
- Removing yourself from the solution

Corollaries
You will explore what corollaries may exist for your new idea. A corollary is a solution that already exists in the market that has already been addressed and solved by someone else.
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In this training, you will
- Use your understanding of your customer, competitor and market to identify and leverage corollaries that accelerate the discovery of preexisting solutions to the problem you are looking to solve.
- Explore the benefits of the 10x employee who has solved your problem before.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Identifying corollaries
- Learning from corollaries
- The 10x employee
- Removing yourself from the solution

Capital for Corporations
All innovation requires capital. For large corporations not used to innovating, finding, defending and scaling this capital is extremely difficult.
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In this training, you will
- Read a survey of existing literature that frames how finance departments can account for investments in innovation.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Balancing finance and innovation
- Innovation accounting

Product Management
You will learn best-practice for building products that customers love, with a focus on digital products. You will walk through the product lifecycle, including: ideation, prototyping, testing, building, finding product-market fit, communicating the launch and pivoting.
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In this training, you will
- Learn best-practice for building products that customers love, with a focus on digital products.
- Walk through the product lifecycle, including: ideation, prototyping, testing, building, finding product-market fit, communicating the launch and pivoting.
- Explore examples of how Amazon, Google, Apple, Basecamp and Fog Creek made their product teams.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Product Management
- Customer-First Design Thinking
- Lean
- Prototyping
- Testing
- Guerilla testing
- Building using agile
- Product-market fit
- Pivoting

Mentorship
You will learn why most Fortune 500 companies are incorporating mentoring as a valuable tool in their talent development, we present critical analyses of the concept, and we detail examples of existing mentorship programs.
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In this training, you will
- Learn the data behind mentorship.
- Learn mentoring models.
- Explore the different types of mentors.
- Learn about the mentoring relationship.
- Learn how to build a mentorship program.
- Learn how to match mentors and mentees.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Mentorship
- Mentoring models
- Mentorship programs
- Mentorship relationships
- Mentorship best practices

Community of Practice
You will learn how to use communities of practice to capture, store and transmit the knowledge that exists in the blank space of an organization: the culture, the conversations, the workflow.
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In this training, you will
- Learn what a community of practice (CoP) is.
- Learn the value of CoPs.
- Explore the types of CoPs.
- Design CoPs.
- Learn how CoPs facilitate knowledge capture and behavior and culture change.
- Explore calculating ROI from CoPs.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Community of Practice
- Community of Practice creation
- Community of Practice design
- Community of Practice valuation
- Community of Practice ROI

Startup Accelerator
You will learn how to build a startup accelerator inside your corporation.
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In this training, you will
- Learn how to build a startup accelerator.
- Choose the design, duration, location, sector and learning process for your accelerator.
- Market your accelerator.
- Choose the startups for your accelerator.
- Select mentors for the startups in your accelerator.
- Manage the startup accelerator.
- Ensure the success of your accelerator after the cohort has left.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Designing Startup Accelerators
- Building Startup Accelerators
- Managing Startup Accelerators

Business Incubator
You will learn how the unique traits of business incubators can help your business evolve. Then, you will learn step-by-step how to build your own business incubator.
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In this training, you will
- Learn a brief history of business incubators.
- Compare incubators to other innovation tools.
- Learn the benefits of participating in a business incubator.
- Learn the underlying theories behind business incubators.
- Walk through how to build a business incubator.
- Explore business incubator metrics and KPIs.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Designing Business Incubators
- Building Business Incubators
- Managing Business Incubators

Mergers and Acquisitions
You will learn about mergers and acquisitions (M&A), one of the most powerful and risky tools in the innovators toolbox.
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In this training, you will
- Learn what mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is.
- Understand how to find “synergy” between organizations.
- Learn the risks associated with mergers and acquisitions.
- Explore when to buy instead of build.
- Learn about the deal lifecycle.
- Learn about divestiture.
- Review a case study on Cisco.
- Read insights from M&A strategy leaders.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Synergy
- Divestiture
- Technology deals

Research and Development
You will look at the ways that market leaders are conducting Research and Development (R&D), examine case studies, and explore actions for today’s forward-thinking firms.
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In this training, you will
- Explore the state of modern research and development (R&D).
- Learn how Amazon and Google’s approaches R&D.
- Learn metrics for R&D.
- Explore best practices for R&D.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Research and development
- Research and development best practices
- Research and development metrics
- Research and development case studies

Innovation & Public Relations
You will learn the benefits and drawbacks of using Public Relations (PR) as a tool to amplify your innovation.
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In this training, you will
- Understand the relationship between PR and innovation.
- Explore the downsides of Innovation Theater.
- Understand innovation as a brand differentiator.
- Learn about trust and credibility with your innovation PR
- Learn how to build momentum with the right message.
- Review crisis management best practices.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Innovation and public relations
- Innovation theater
- Innovation as a differentiator
- Crisis management
- Trust and credibility

Advertising
You will dive deep into the digital advertising industry, the major players and their tools. Digital advertising is the most measurable, effective and efficient advertising tool ever created for businesses.
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In this training, you will
- Review a brief history of advertising
- Dive deep into modern digital advertising
- Understand retargeting
- Review video advertising
- Explore Google and Facebook’s industry dominance
- Learn how ads change consumer behavior
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Advertising
- Digital marketing
- Customer acquisition costs
- Ad targeting
- Retargeting

Diversity and Inclusion
This document is a work in progress. I hope to have instructions for you soon. In the interim, I have found some statistics that highlight the scope and scale of the problem.
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In this training, you will
- Explore the data that characterizes the work that needs to be done to ensure that we create diverse, equitable and inclusive work places.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Understand the challenges to diversity
- equity and inclusion

Corporate Culture
You must build a culture that fosters productivity while balancing the tremendous social, political, environmental, economic, technical and legal challenges and changes that are present today.
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In this training, you will
- Learn about the complexities of building a corporate culture that is inclusive and diverse.
- Learn about Silicon Valley’s “best practices” in culture.
- Explore examples of culture from Netflix, Facebook, Microsoft and Enron
- Explore stack ranking
- Learn how to change existing culture
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Identifying culture
- Building culture
- Incentivizing culture

The Employee Experience
You will explore how to create an employee experience that keeps staff committed, engaged and resentment free by prioritizing the employee experience.
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In this training, you will
- Prioritize the employee experience.
- Explore how to keep and develop the best talent.
- Learn how to keep your team committed, engaged and resentment free.
- Promote goodwill on your team.
- Use mentoring and employee development programs.
- Train leaders to have an HR mindset.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Building the employee experience
- Employee engagement
- Employee mentoring
- Employee development
- HR Mindset

Talent Acquisition
You will explore how to find and attract the talent that your innovation needs to be successful. Innovation is relatively easy with the right team.
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In this training, you will
- Explore approaches to talent acquisition.
- Consider branding to proactively attract talent, shifting from a talent seeker to a talent magnet.
- Use big data to improve the candidate experience.
- Learn how to navigate the initial candidate conversations.
- Ensuring you use a human touch to secure the candidates you want.
- Learn the costs and effects of bad hires.
Skills That Will Be Explored
- Talent Acquisition
- Talent Magnet
- Candidate Conversations
- Talent Magnet
- Avoiding Bad Hires