Training on creativity and innovation
Have a look and let me know what would work best for you. Or tell me when you’re free for a call so we can create something bespoke.





Training for all organisations
Creating Competitive Advantage
A process with defined outputs
If you want to be more successful in business, you need to have at least one reason for customers to choose you rather than your competitors. I’ve created this three-stage programme to help you develop a competitive advantage and unlock more opportunities for your business.
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Managing Teams for Better Ideas
A one-day in-house training session
Collaborative creative thinking in organizations is more important than ever, This course reveals a practical approach to managing groups toward inspired, creative thinking. The framework you learn will help you get better ideas out of teams and improve the chances of you selling them.
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Constant inspiration
A one-day in-house training session
This session looks at how to gather the most valuable kind of input that will help you generate ideas. And how to retain that information for when you need it. The result is the ability to come up with ideas you wouldn’t normally have and less time spent staring at a wall waiting for inspiration to strike.
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The workshop workshop
A one-day in-house training session
The purpose of a workshop is to get the best thinking out of a group of people. And to get to a useful output. This practical session looks at how to plan a workshop, from selecting the participants and defining the output through to creating the exercises and moderating the session.
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Ongoing training programmes
If you’re serious about improving the ideas you get from your employees, I’ll work with you to create an ongoing programme that will increase skills and processes across the organisation. This will likely involve boosting idea-generation skills for all employees and showing managers how to get better ideas out of teams.
Agency-specific training
So I’ve developed training sessions for all areas of an agency, from juniors to the leadership team.
Cross-media campaign ideas
A one-day in-house training session
The old matching luggage approach to campaigns isn’t the way forward any more. A quick glance at the work that’s picking up awards will tell you that. Instead, it’s about having a central idea that’s brought to life in the best possible way in each media channel. This session looks at how to do that most effectively.
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How to sell ideas
A one-day in-house training session
Anything an agency can do to increase its strike-rate is good for business. This session looks at the entire process to explore simple adjustments that can increase the chance of selling ideas. It offers practical advice and concrete actions you can implement immediately. All without being boring.
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The big P.R. opportunity
A one-day in-house training session
Take a browse through the case studies of the world’s most awarded marketing campaigns and you might notice that they all have one thing in common: they brag about how much PR coverage they’ve received. This session shows PR agencies how to benefit from that and use it to attract more business.
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Ongoing training programs
Whatever your needs are
If you’re serious about improving the ideas you get from your employees, I’ll work with you to create an ongoing programme that will increase skills and processes across the organisation. This will likely involve boosting idea-generation skills for all employees and showing managers how to get better ideas out of teams.
Find out more >
Remote training
I’ve recently developed a number of sessions that are specifically designed for digital delivery. These are not second-rate versions of my face-to-face courses. No sirree. They’ve been created specifically for remote presentation.
I’ve discovered that aiming to create courses for this kind of delivery actually opens up new possibilities that in-person training can’t easily achieve. I’m rather excited about them!
These sessions are perfect for staff who are working from home, for companies with employees scattered across multiple locations and for businesses outside the UK that want me to do training but can’t afford the airfare.
Five-day creative workout
5 half-hour sessions plus coursework
This series of five half-hour sessions is designed to improve a number of creative skills. Like flexibility of thinking, gathering of inspiration, idea generation and judgement. Each session ends by setting practical work that we’ll discuss the following day. This is a mix of teaching, doing and reviewing.
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Regular inspiration sessions
Regular 1-hour sessions
If you want your team to keep producing great ideas, you need to keep topping up their minds with quality input. These sessions share nuggets of inspiration that we’ll turn into practical output. These can then be used to help generate ideas. And improve judgement at the same time.
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1-to-1 creative mentoring
Regular 1-hour sessions
Over the years, I’ve mentored a number of creative directors and managers. I’ve helped them develop their own skills, raise the standards in the workplace and acted as a sounding board. It’s just as easy to do these sessions remotely. We’ll set some aims and I’ll help to keep you on track and keep you accountable.
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How to do online workshops
One-day session
Even if we’re separated from our teams, we still need to keep investigating options, coming up with ideas and making decisions. And workshops are an ideal way to do those things. This course looks at how to plan and run remote workshops. We look at preparation, technology and exercises that will help you achieve what you want.
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Remote Workshops
To help businesses stay productive during the current pandemic, I’m also running workshops to help them develop strategies, generate ideas and make decisions.
ABOUT DAVE BIRSS
Each of these sessions is run by author and educator Dave Birss. Dave is a former advertising creative director who picked up lots of awards for his work over 20 years in the industry. Over the last few years, he’s worked with dozens of companies across lots of sectors to help them get more impactful ideas out of their teams.
Dave’s best known for teaching, speaking and writing books on creativity and innovation. But he also consults for companies to help them benefit from creative thinking..
Dave is a Visiting Professor at Kingston School of Art and has taught at universities from London to New York, Santiago to Singapore. He recently launched a couple of courses on LinkedIn Learning and is working on another four courses for release later in the year.
Having a ridiculous surname makes him very Google-able. Have a go and see what dirt you can find.