Global Alliance Africa at Innovate UK KTN delivers Innovation Canvas Training in South Africa

What is the Innovation Canvas?

The Innovation Canvas was developed and designed by Innovate UK KTN in association with Miller-Klein to help businesses focus on the most important challenges in developing an innovative product, service or process.

It helps identify a particular innovation challenge and prioritise what actions you should take next. The Innovation Canvas training course was designed to help ensure that innovation is delivered with maximum impact and value using the framework of the KTN Innovation Canvas – a tool designed to help organisations explore, design and establish an innovation strategy for the delivery of new products, services or processes.On completion of a Canvas you also receive KTN’s recommendations for further sources of knowledge and help.

But this was a UK-focussed product – until KTN decided to take it further afield and to launch the training in Africa for the first time!

Training in Pretoria

The Innovation Hub and eKasiLabs wanted to better understand how Area Managers and Business Development Officers would be able to support innovators as part of Hub activities, and so the Global Alliance Africa team responded quickly to put the Innovation Canvas training in action, and visited Pretoria, South Africa, to deploy the programme. The training was delivered by Marisa Naidoo, Knowledge Transfer Manager for South Africa, and Chiara Bassetti, Project Manager for Global Alliance Africa. EkasiLabs aims to be the innovation agency of choice for fostering economic development and competitiveness in Gauteng, so this training complements their vision for creating new business opportunities in the future.

The Innovation Canvas training covered three main objectives in the course:

1. to understand the Innovation Canvas and the benefits of utilising the
   canvas in comparison to other tools
2. to understand how to use the Innovation Canvas to identify Challenges
   and develop Action Points with innovators
3. to understand how to support innovators with their next steps following
   the completion of the Innovation Canvas

Training focussed on the role of innovation as a framework for new product and service development addressing the challenges faced by the companies or entrepreneurs seeking to use innovation as a process to generate competitive advantage.

Chiara Bassetti, Project Manager, Global Alliance Africa commented,

This is the first time we have delivered the Innovation Canvas training in Africa and it was a real success. Innovation Hub and eKasiLabs were enthusiastic about the tool and could see real potential for how the canvas can support their innovators on the journey to commercialisation.