Facilitating innovation within an organization is about much more than a series of helpful techniques and methods to assist brainstorming! It is a disciplined, cost effective, holistic approach to value creation that transcends individual markets or products. Slingshot PDG presents in this session a road map for innovation within any company, and with it the opportunity to bring lasting value to any organization.

Overview
Much of the world of New Product Development focuses upon hard product Innovation. Products that you can see, touch, and hold in your hands; but innovation is as important within the Service sector as it in hard product development.

Slingshot wants to challenge and mobilize the session participants to think more broadly and use its techniques to innovate not only within consumer or medical products, but also within the service sector. In this session you will be challenged to solve the one of the most intractable problems faced by the City of Atlanta as well as develop a product that each one of us holds in our hands every day.

The Slingshot holistic approach will be illustrated through the essential ingredients of: Identifying the problem to solve – Sometimes referred to as: "the fuzzy front end."; Research & Initial Concepts; The valuable place of Brainstorming; Techniques for Merging & Selection; Precipitation of decision; & Establishment of Design Direction.

The session will also elaborate upon the integration of these processes with techniques of hard product and service sector product development development—Engineering, Design Detail through, Prototyping / Dry, run testing, Analysis & detailing.

Slingshot learning does not like it's audience to sit in one place for very long. Through a competition involving your participation with cash prizes, we hope to illustrate the techniques outlined above. Prepare to become a wealthy entrepreneur and a session celebrity, as you commercialize new products through the Slingshot learning's holistic approach, as well as surprise the world and yourself with your team's hard product development success: ahead of dead-line and below budget.

About the Session Leader:

Nigel Flynn joins the 2007 SEAF Annual conference with an adult professional career entirely devoted to New Products Development from product concept to volume sales.

His career began in the sciences where his post-graduate university research and teaching led to his first worldwide patent held by British Petroleum in the fields of Paper and Cellulosic-ethanol production.

His international management career has led across two continents, and his product development work has resulted in ten worldwide patents embracing: Consumer Products; Healthcare; Industrial; and Military/ Security fields.

Among his early achievements was the world's most effective radar absorbent material, as well as a range of military defense products awarded the ‘most innovative materials' developed in a four-year period within Western Europe by the industry organization - EDANA. He recently managed the New Product Development activities of a $200MM medical business focused upon biodegradable products and a Start-up business based in Atlanta, GA.

Nigel currently works with Slingshot Product Development Group where he retained by a range of companies from fortune 500 to start-ups in New Product Development projects in all the above fields. Slingshot PDG is expecting to launch a range of New Product Development ‘Learning' Products later this year through a channel to be announced.

His private passions include Jazz and a search for funds to launch a nationally syndicated public radio program. He is also shamelessly idiosyncratic in his need to stop working at 3:00pm each day for afternoon tea.