Create Your Business Story, Make Strategic Choices and Turn Ideas into Reality

Learn an accessible and actionable process to do the work of innovation, no matter your role or industry. This process helps you imagine new strategic possibilities, quickly and inexpensively test to de-risk these possibilities, and build compelling business cases to grow confidence and consensus.

In this Summer School program, you’ll learn how to merge creative thinking with analytical rigor, develop ways to grow influence around your ideas, and get to bold, new products and services faster—all while staying tightly aligned with the needs of your customers and the realities of your business or organization. Whether you work in business, government, education, or nonprofit, this certificate will help you drive and follow through on innovative initiatives.

SUMMER SCHOOL OUTCOMES

• Learn a process to make strategic choices centered on both the needs of your customers as well as your business or organization.
• Follow repeatable steps to imagine and test strategic initiatives that combine analytical rigor and creativity, and equip you with confidence to move these initiatives forward.
• Gain storytelling techniques to quickly develop, test, and iterate parts of a business model (value proposition, revenue model, and channel) to make new programs, products, and services that are grounded in what people really want.
• Apply methods from storytelling (such as characterisation, visualizing, brainstorming, prototyping, and iteration) to business modeling and strategy.
• Grow your storytelling skills and confidence to undertake, plan, and lead day-to-day strategic efforts, as well as broad wide-scale innovation initiatives.

Summer School Program Overview

Day 1. Create Your Strategy Story

Choosing what to do—and what not to do—is the definition of strategy. In this course, you’ll learn a process that will help you create and take action on a strategy for your business, team, or organization. You’ll follow repeatable steps that are both human-centered and business-focused. By combining rigor and creativity, you can both analyze the world as it is and imagine how it could be better.

COURSE OUTCOMES

• Identify a strategic problem that your organization faces, frame it as a question, and brainstorm possibilities to solve it.
• Surface and pick the conditions that would need to be true to make the possibility a winning strategy.
• Build and conduct different types of tests to help you choose among your possibilities.
• Set your team up to be able to take action on the strategic choices you make.

Day 2. Create Your Business Story

Learn how to make a business desirable for customers, financially viable for stakeholders, and feasible to build and deliver to the world.

At The Hero’s Journey, instead of writing a static business plan, we design rapid story prototypes to test and iterate business concepts. In this course, you’ll combine traditional business strategy with the methods and mindsets of storytelling and prototype three parts of a business—value proposition and offer, revenue model, and sales channel.

Whether you’re working on new initiatives and ventures inside an existing business or organization, or you’re an entrepreneur ready to bring a startup to life, this course will help you de-risk your business ideas and craft a sustainable business model that is rooted in the people you wish to serve.

COURSE OUTCOMES

• Remove risk from creating new business models and get to product-market fit faster.
• Build stronger, more innovative solutions that solve real needs for your customers.
• Prototype and iterate components of your business model to unlock more value from an existing product or service.
• Determine which offer, revenue model, and sales channel will work for your business.
• Draft a business blueprint to move your concept forward and get buy-in from others.

About Peter de Kuster

Peter de Kuster is the founder of The Heroine’s Journey & Hero’s Journey project,  a storyteller who helps creative professionals to create careers and lives based on whatever story is most integral to their lives and careers (values, traits, skills and experiences). Peter’s approach combines in-depth storytelling and marketing expertise, and for over 20 years clients have found it effective with a wide range of creative business issues.

Peter is writer of the series The Heroine’s Journey and Hero’s Journey books, he has an MBA in Marketing,  MBA in Financial Economics and graduated at university in Sociology and Communication Sciences.

Join us for a truly transformational vacation for the mind.

Practical Info

The price of this two day Summer School storytelling seminar in Rome is Euro 1950 excluding VAT per person

When you want to attend with two or more people there are special prices

You can reach Peter for questions about dates and the program by mailing him at theherojourneyquestionnaires@gmail.com

TIMETABLE

09.40    Tea & Coffee on arrival at Hotel de Russie in Rome

10.00     Morning Session

13.00     Lunch Break

14.00     Afternoon Session

18.00     Drinks