SILICON VALLEY, Calif., March 30, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Innovation Minds, based in Silicon Valley, has announced an incredible celebration in honour of World Creativity and Innovation Week in April, in the form of “Spring Forward 2022” grants for selected enterprises, academic institutions, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The grants, valued at $50,000 (fifty thousand dollars) each, will provide technology and facilitation of innovation sprints to help these organizations tackle capacity, organizational, and community challenges. These sprints aim to provide up to a 5x increase in employee experience, innovation capacity, and productivity.
Innovation Minds will offer up to twenty of these grants to qualifying organizations, investing a total of up to one million dollars into the world’s innovation capacity. The program supports both organizational and social innovation challenges, applying best practices in Silicon Valley innovation to organizational improvements and social innovation.
Rosemary Rein, SVP of Product at Innovation Minds, who is spearheading this process, says: “Imagine creating a breakthrough solution to an organizational or community challenge in only sixty days! Innovation is a core competency today, and we want to help build that muscle.”
Rein points out that the well-known difficulty of creating and sustaining innovation in any organization is not easy to overcome. So how is Innovation Minds achieving this result?
“To start with, our team has an incredible wealth of experience in both innovation and human resources in some major companies I think you’ve heard of – LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pay Pal, eBay, to name a few. And our team of international facilitators living and working all over the world have combined years of experience I can’t even enumerate.”
The CEO and Founder of Innovation Minds, Bala Balasubramaniam, adds that Rein herself was previously Director of Learning, Education, and Knowledge Management at United Way Worldwide, Wikipedia, and No Bully. He also points out the most recent pilot of the Innovation Minds Sprints in partnership with the US Embassy in Suriname was a blazing success.
“Our program is much more than the typical sprint,” Balasubramaniam says. “We aim to provide a place and space to build the capacity for leaders to create real community impact, in every organization we touch. In short, to make innovation a core competency forever. In shorter – to make innovation as easy as breathing!”
The grant is made possible by an Innovation Minds partnership with the AI Societies at both UC Davis and UC Berkley. The grant provides access to Innovation Minds’ proprietary artificial intelligence and machine-learning-driven technology for six months, extending far beyond the period of the sprint, to allow the projects to begin to be implemented.
“Using Innovation Minds’ technology made things so much easier for our innovators,” says Ashna Mahepal, the organizer of the Suriname project. “It is really next level and cutting-edge, bringing together the best practices in both innovation and experience, and it is going to allow our innovators to really make their projects have an impact in our society and our nation.”
At the end of each sprint, participants pitch the top ideas they have generated to sponsors and investors in a Sharkathon format. This helps bring the best ideas to the top from the sprint process and keeps the intellectual property bubbling up from within the organization.
“We extract great ideas from YOUR people,” says Michael Lee, author of the upcoming book Everything is Innovation, and one of the mentors in the Suriname project. “That’s what makes Innovation Minds’ process really different, and what makes it so great. We don’t swoop in like those big-name consultancies and dictate to you what will work best at your own organization.”
“The goal,” Rein adds, “is to take your team through the whole innovation cycle, from identifying the challenges, through idea generation, convergence, to developing and pitching their solutions – and finally bringing their ideas to life. To help you Create Tomorrow, Today.”
Challenges eligible for the grant program range from employee experience to hybrid work to tackling social impact areas of health and wellbeing, environment, community and capacity building, diversity and inclusion, and education.
Applicants can apply for the grant by writing to Innovation Minds at the contacts below with a brief summary of the challenges they are facing and what they intend to accomplish.
Applicants should note that this grant covers all basic expenses of the program but any special customizations the applicant requests may involve additional cost components.
“We can make innovators out of anybody,” Balasubramaniam boldly declares. “As long as they are willing to play.”
The grant application deadline is April 15, the launch of World Creativity and Innovation Week 2022, with grant winners announced on April 21, World Creativity and Innovation Day.
“World Creativity & Innovation Week is thrilled and honoured that Innovation Minds has chosen to celebrate creativity in this way,” adds Dr. Jim Friedman, the Chief Steward of the World Creativity and Innovation Week host organization. “Too many talk about the importance of innovation but Innovation Minds is putting action behind their ideas. That is what we need for creative leadership.”
World Creativity and Innovation Day is a global United Nations holiday celebrated on April 21st to raise awareness around the importance of creativity and innovation with respect to advancing the UN sustainable development goals. The purpose of the day is to encourage creative multidisciplinary thinking at the individual and group levels which, according to a special report on the creative economy by UNESCO, UNDP, and UNOSSC, has "become the true wealth of nations in the 21st century."
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:
Rosemary Rein, SVP Products & Outreach, Innovation Minds. +1 239 666 8054, rosemary@innovationminds.com
Bala Balasubramaniam, CEO, Innovation Minds. +1 408 605 8471, bala@innovationminds.com
