Once Upon an Innovation: Business Storytelling Techniques for Creative Collaboration

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein

Since the early 2000s, business storytelling has become a widely accepted strategy for companies around the world. Stories are harnessed in advertising, marketing, PR, and even leadership and culture development. Now for the first time ever, Once Upon an Innovation builds upon these practices and applies story techniques to creative problem solving and innovation.

Stories light up the imagination, fostering the creative collaboration necessary to inspire, develop, and commercialize winning ideas. Stories also trigger the brain to release oxytocin, the trust and empathy hormone, making them a powerful tool for understanding and addressing users' needs. This also means that storytelling methods can be applied to the other half of the battle-getting others on board with new ideas as they move through the various checkpoints in an organization.

This easy-to-read, "how to" guidebook provides story-based strategies and tools to:

• generate rich and meaningful ideas.
>
• rally stakeholders and a team around a vision.
• gain empathy for user and insights into users.
• bring formative ideas to life for testing and prototyping.
• develop storytelling skills to persuade and inspire others.

With an engaging balance of anecdotes, theories, and tools, Jean Storlie and Mimi Sherlock take their combined 50+ years of experience to illustrate how storytelling can be applied to accelerate innovation and lead change.

Gather around the campfire your story starts now.

As President/Owner of Storlietelling LLC, Jean Storlie uses story-based techniques to design and facilitate highly engaging strategic planning, innovation, and team-building sessions. She also runs training programs in business storytelling skills for clients that span boutique consulting firms to Fortune 500 companies across a range of industries. Jean has facilitated innovation in consumer-packaged goods, supplier, and direct marketing companies, focusing on building their innovation pipelines. She worked at General Mills for over a decade, where her knack for distilling complex content into compelling communications helped business teams drive business growth for consumer brands like Cheerios and Yoplait. As a child, she loved reading books, playing dress-up, and solving puzzles, foreshadowing the work she does now-solving problems with stories.

Mimi Sherlock is the Director of Global Strategic Insights for IFF Taste. She is responsible for inspiring and motivating creative teams by bringing actionable insights to life and facilitating end to-end innovation. Prior to this, Mimi was the Principal and Owner of Sherlock Creative Thinking, a creativity and innovation consultancy that served a variety of clients and industries across the globe. Through her highly engaging and experiential approach, Mimi helped business teams in companies like Visa, L'Oreal, and Nestlé crack the code on gnarly problems . . . and enjoy the process. She has been a leader and facilitation trainer for the Creative Problem Solving Institute for close to thirty years. As a natural ideator, if you give Mimi a challenge she's likely to spew out twenty-five ideas in under five minutes.