Master the Front End of Innovation: Join Our Workshop at ICSB 2025 Cairo
Discover how to transform weak concepts into breakthrough innovations
Design Thinking workshops that dissolve into endless brainstorming sessions. Lean Startup pivots that never quite find product-market fit. Sound familiar? If your organization has struggled to translate popular innovation frameworks into tangible results, you’re not alone—and there’s a better way forward.
At the ICSB 2025 World Congress in Cairo this year, Prof. David C. Roach will lead a transformative workshop that addresses a critical truth often overlooked in innovation: weak concepts rarely evolve into success, regardless of the tools employed.
Beyond the Limitations
“Overcoming the Limitations of Design Thinking and the Lean Startup” introduces the Innovation Approach, a complementary framework that strengthens the front end of innovation where most initiatives succeed or fail. While Design Thinking and Lean Startup offer valuable tools, they frequently fall short in practice. Design Thinking sessions often reduce to brainstorming exercises without rigorous validation, while Lean Startup can trap teams in endless pivot cycles, assuming success will eventually emerge through iteration alone.
The Innovation Approach takes a different path. It emphasizes proven best practices from idea genesis through concept validation, ensuring that products and services are demonstrably desirable, feasible, and viable before significant resources are committed. This disciplined foundation prepares concepts for downstream innovation activities—and positions organizations to truly unleash innovation across their operations.
A Natural, Linear Innovation Cycle
The workshop is structured in three powerful sections:
Framing Innovation explores the evolution of innovation approaches, distinguishing between systems, methods, processes, and techniques. Participants will examine Design Thinking and Lean Startup in relation to established best practices, identifying gaps and opportunities for a more reliable model.
Core Steps introduces a natural linear innovation cycle consisting of secondary research, benchmarking, primary research, and ideation. Each step systematically sharpens focus, clarifies the problem space, and strengthens the foundation for breakthrough concepts—preventing the common pitfall of building solutions for poorly understood problems.
Advanced Tools and Techniques demonstrates how outputs from initial discovery fuel minimal viable product testing and feedback loops. Subsequent cycles focus on adoption, lead users, and sustainability, progressively strengthening emerging concepts and transforming them into high-value innovation opportunities.
Who Should Attend
This workshop serves three distinct audiences, each with unique benefits:
Practitioners currently using Design Thinking and Lean Startup will gain practical insights to enhance the effectiveness of their methods and overcome common implementation challenges.
Organizations struggling to realize the potential of popular innovation approaches will discover a focal point for re-energizing their innovation efforts and building more robust innovation capabilities.
Academics will be exposed to promising avenues for research and inquiry in innovation management, entrepreneurship, and product development.
Learn from Experience
Prof. David C. Roach brings a rare combination of academic rigor and practical expertise to innovation. As an Associate Professor at Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management, he teaches graduate courses in entrepreneurship and innovation, and lectures internationally on innovation, product development, and biomedical technology.
Critically, he’s also the co-founder, President, and CEO of a MedTech company, providing him with firsthand experience in navigating the complex realities of bringing innovations to market. His extensive publications on innovation, entrepreneurship, and product management inform a workshop grounded in both theory and practice.
Align with “Innovation Unleashed”
The Innovation Approach directly supports the ICSB 2025 conference theme, “Innovation Unleashed.” By mastering the crucial early stages of innovation, participants will be better equipped to unlock innovation potential across their organizations—not through more brainstorming or faster pivoting, but through disciplined discovery and validation that produces concepts worthy of investment.
In today’s competitive landscape, organizations can’t afford to waste resources on weak concepts. Join us in Cairo to learn how to get innovation right from the start.
The ICSB 2025 World Congress takes place in Cairo, Egypt. For more information about the conference and to register for this workshop, visit the ICSB Global website.