Course Introduction
Business leaders must contend with the rise of AI, geopolitical turbulence, and fast-shifting buyer expectations that require them to create new offerings and adapt faster than traditional business frameworks can adjust.
To develop a competitive edge in their industry and career, business leaders also must understand innovation fundamentals. They must develop the ability to anticipate customer needs as they emerge and evolve, and to develop those insights into new products, services, and processes at a new or existing venture before their competitors -- and with fewer missteps.
Traditional approaches to leadership and problem-solving struggle to keep pace in the current environment, leaving organizations stuck in reactive cycles. Internal innovation efforts often get derailed by risk aversion, siloed thinking, and a lack of practical frameworks for success. Outperformers have learned to develop a deeper understanding of what motivates (and irritates) end users, challenge biases in their organizations and themselves, and follow a repeatable and scalable path to new insights and reduced innovation risks.
This course is designed to provide proven frameworks, practical applications, and an emphasis on helping each participant develop the innovative mindsets and skillsets required for innovative problem-solving in organizations big and small.
Through hands-on activities, case studies, and actionable strategies, this course will equip participants with the tools, mindsets, and frameworks to develop meaningfully unique ideas, systematically identify and mitigate the unique risks to each, and build the resulting innovative concepts into competitive advantage. Particular attention will include how to innovate with AI inside an enterprise setting.
You’ll learn to:
- Foster a culture of experimentation, risk-taking, and collaboration.
- Empower teams to solve problems creatively and resourcefully.
- Implement practical methods to reduce risk and drive innovation quickly and inexpensively.
- Align innovation efforts with strategic goals to ensure measurable impact.
This course is for leaders and managers who want their core professional skillset to include how to identify and solve unique problems. Participants will learn to develop innovative concepts for products, services, and processes, de-risk them, and foster higher engagement in their teams, accelerate growth, and navigate complexity with confidence.
Course Design
This course explores four skillset themes that are crucial to leading innovation and change in an organization.
· Theme 1: Discovery and Creation– You will practice the skills that are required to see the world through a different lens, to identify opportunities and potential sources of disruption, and to create non-obvious solutions to problems. We will explore these skills and practice flexing these muscles through in-class exercises and group homework assignments. Creativity and structured problem-solving will be heavily emphasized throughout the entire class.
· Theme 2: De-Risking and Execution – Not knowing how to manage risk is a leading reason why companies kill breakthrough innovation. We will explore why this happens and learn tactical tools you can employ as a leader to manage risk and execute innovation despite the unknowns.
· Theme 3: Communication and Influence – Communicating new or complex ideas and bringing others along to support you is crucial to making innovation happen. In this portion of the class we will explore how to employ alternative strategies such as visual communication and storytelling in your pursuit of communicating your ideas and influencing others.
· Theme 4: Innovation Infrastructure – This portion of the class will explore operational topics surrounding innovation with a focus on how to develop a sustainable innovation strategy supported by the right capabilities, structure, and culture. We will discuss various organizational and strategic models for executing innovation, and the challenges of execution within established enterprises.
Readings and asynchronous lectures will be assigned prior to each class to introduce content. Classroom time will be spent applying the course concepts through case discussions, in-class activities, and guest speakers. Students will also work in teams on hands-on group assignments throughout the quarter that parallel course content and enable you to apply skills learned in class.
Learning Objectives
This class is designed to build on other business and course skills to make you a more creative and ambidextrous thinker. The objective is to arm you with a toolkit for leading innovation and growth in the context of high risk, nebulous, and highly uncertain innovation initiatives. We will cover the foundational principles of user-centered design and prototyping through the context of solving business problems broadly, however traditional product development tools and frameworks are not the focus of the class. Specific learning outcomes of this course include becoming:
· A stronger innovation practitioner (greater proficiency of using innovation skills and tools)
· A more effective manager of innovation (ability to manage the process and connect the right people/recourses/thinking to make things happen)
· A more inspirational leader of innovation (greater ability to think creatively, teach others, and inspire others)
