Illumination Academy 2024

DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND, WE HAVE EXTENDED THE APPLICATION DEADLINE TO SEPTEMBER 13th!

Empower Yourself, Empower Your Team: Step into the Illumination Academy!

Illumination Academy, brought to you by the AHS Design Lab and Innovation & Business Intelligence teams, is an eight-session 12-week program created to equip teams with design-led methodologies for addressing complex challenges in the health and care sector. Through immersive workshops and personalized coaching, participants will learn about designerly mindsets and tools, and develop innovative strategies to drive positive change. Empower your team to embrace ambiguity, identify new opportunities, and generate impactful solutions!

Program Goals

Creative problem solving involves multiple steps that go beyond brainstorming solutions and ideation. Illumination Academy equips participants with the knowledge, skills, and experience to evolve their ideas into breakthrough solutions that are validated by key stakeholders. Whether a departmental problem or system wide challenge, Illumination Academy adds to the repertoire of tools for managers and frontline staff that can be used to problem-solve day-to-day challenges. Here’s what you can achieve through this program:

Enhance your skills and knowledge, joining 500 fellow healthcare staff in professional growth.
Transform your ideas into breakthrough solutions by developing and validating paper prototypes.
Be part of a vibrant culture of innovation and intrapreneurship, making a meaningful impact in healthcare.

What to Expect

This eight-session program is a fast paced, hands-on experience that will enable you to not only learn design thinking and innovation methodologies but to also apply them in the real-world setting. Topics covered include:

Empathy - Understanding the user experience
Challenge identification & reframing
Ideation and Creativity
Solution Narrowing and Selection
Developing paper prototypes
Gathering User Feedback
Next Steps - Transitioning from a paper prototype to a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

What’s in it for you (innovator/intrapreneur)?

Illumination Academy provides the learner with intensive support and direction to bring ideas/solutions to life with proven tools and methodologies. As a health care professional passionate to build your knowledge and skill around change and innovation, you will have the opportunity to:

Experience the key steps to effective and creative problem solving
Acquire and apply design thinking and innovation development skills, transferrable to any role or organization.
Tailored support and consultations to help bring YOUR ideas to life.
Access to a diverse group of experts focused on helping your solution development.
Transparency and guidance on your innovation journey during and beyond this programming.

What’s in it for you (manager/director)?

Does your team have a potential innovative idea to solve a critical pain point within your unit/department? Then this programming would be invaluable for your team to get the support and guidance they need to be able to explore and validate their ideas, as well as the potential opportunity to bring the solution to life and apply it. If that does not convince you of the value of this programming, there are more benefits below:

Novel solutions being developed to address YOUR pain points and support your ability to meet strategic goals
Transparency and influence to guide innovation development that fits your environment and ensures alignment with your needs

The Commitment

Participants will be going through 8 workshops over a 12-week period starting September 19th, 2024 to December 3, 2024. Intended to be both instructional and hands-on, teams will receive an hour of education per workshops and additional space and time between education sessions to develop their own competencies. Design coaches will assist teams as they explore the use of new tools and techniques with further opportunities to engaged via open office hours. A detailed schedule will be provided well in advance of the first session.

What to Bring

Ideally, you/your team bring a specific challenge or pain point that you want to solve. It could be a challenge facing your team, department, or even system level and which you would like to explore further. While this is not required, bringing a specific challenge will enable you to get the most from this learning experience.

Who Can Apply?

Our cohorts are limited to 500 individuals to allow for more meaningful engagement in sessions as well as via our consultations. To that end, the programming is open to all interested innovators, but preference will be given to the following groups:

AHS Staff
Teams that bring a shared challenge

When and How to Apply

Applications will open: July 18th, 2024
NEW Application Deadline: Friday, September 13th, 2024

To apply, fill out the application form below or click here.