Mastering Innovation Strategy, Process, and Tools

There is a resounding theme in today’s corporate landscape: Innovate or die. Successful companies do not wait for opportunity — they create it. And that takes more than just being innovative — it requires building a process that activates innovation within your organization.

Mastering Innovation Strategy, Process, and Tools gives you the frameworks, tools, methodologies and disciplines to develop and install a process for innovation. From the radical innovations that shake up entire industries to the many small innovations that perfect the execution of already successful organizations, this program will show you how to treat innovation as a process, one to be managed and turned into a driver of profits and growth. It pulls you beyond finding the next big idea, and teaches you how to empower and commercialize that idea for greater levels of success.

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

Mastering Innovation Strategy, Process, and Tools enables you to achieve success by showing you how to:

• Deploy the technology, tools, and principles to effectively recognize, evaluate and validate new opportunities
• Create a corporate culture that fosters ongoing, company-wide creativity
• Build an architecture that allows innovation to thrive throughout your company
• Successfully invest for future growth while managing the risks of disruption
• Perfect your own creative problem-solving skills while developing these skills across your organization
• Determine when to enact radical innovation from within, and when to seek it externally
• Utilize design thinking and lean validation methods to hasten your response to opportunities

How much does innovation cost? Well, how much is it worth? Mastering Innovation imparts immediately applicable methods that help you fully understand a need, create a solution to meet that need, and develop a sustainable business model in which your solution is worth more than the cost of delivering it.

There is another thing successful companies do well, and that is experience failure. Indeed, failure is a huge part of innovation. It means you have ventured into the unknown, explored unpredictable outcomes, and taken risks to push boundaries, test theories and identify what it takes to win.

Through this program, you will perfect your innovation skills and learn how to:

• Identify successful opportunities triggered by changes in technology, regulation and shifting or new customer preferences
• Actively manage real-world solutions in a hands-on Innovation Tournament
• Execute targeted strategies that turn unmet customer needs into actionable innovative solutions

You will generate and valuate ideas on an individual level, while also addressing systematic approaches for creating processes to produce multiple ideas that can be identified, developed and commercialized.

Program Format

Mastering Innovation includes two online sessions prior to your arrival on campus. These sessions will include an introduction to an innovation tournament, a hallmark of this program. This advanced preparation will build your innovative mindset and peer-to-peer learning community before the program begins.

In-class session topics include:

• Technological Disruption and Transformation
• Open Innovation: Engaging the External Innovation Ecosystem
• Organizing for Innovation, and the Effective Use of Individuals and Groups
• Ideation: Generating Ideas and Divergent Thinking
• Design Thinking and Its Application in Organizations
• Rapid Validation of Ideas and Lean Innovation