The Innovative Technology Leader

Explore the intersection of innovation, technology, and business, and learn to drive strategic change across your organization.

Strategy. Innovation. Leadership. Today’s technology leaders need skills in all three areas. With change as a constant, the key to success is learning how to keep pace on a global scale, to innovate, and to nurture and develop value-creating ideas across your organization.

In six intense days, you’ll work with Stanford GSB faculty and peers from around the globe to learn how to anticipate and respond to the complex and rapidly changing issues in the world of information technology. Experience hands-on design thinking sessions at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, also called the d.school.

Uncover the subtle and often-unseen dynamics underlying technology trends. Learn how to recognize the key drivers of innovation and understand the critical role of effective leadership.

This fast-paced program combines classroom learning, visits from Silicon Valley speakers, VC panels, and a unique opportunity to interact with Stanford PhD students developing the latest technologies.

Key Benefits

Acquire data, tools, and techniques to drive change and leverage technology across your organization.

• Explore how current technology changes in cloud computing, mobile devices, social media tools, and other areas are driving global growth.
• Leverage technology changes for competitive advantage.
• Observe and understand the needs of users and customers through design thinking principles.
• Strategize about how to create a culture to support innovation.
• Recognize ways to build personal power and influence in your organization.

Program Highlights

Innovation Frontiers: The Neuroscience of Decision-Making

To better understand your customers and their purchasing decisions, you must first understand how humans fundamentally make decisions. A substantial proportion of these decisions are shaped by basic instinctual systems and processes that are not only automatic but also nonconscious.

Throughout the course of the two sessions, we will unravel these basic neural systems, placing an emphasis on the liking and the wanting systems. In the process, we will highlight the critical role that emotion plays in the customer decision-making process and the ways by which one can shape emotion to foster greater loyalty toward and willingness to pay for an offering.

We will also discuss the downside of focusing on price rather than the brand to create a superior customer-value proposition and, based on our understanding of the instinctual brain systems, the effective incentive systems that can be set for your customers.

Organizing for Product Market Fit

This course takes the perspective of the general manager and explores two key facets of strategic leadership: setting strategic direction and managing the strategy-making process in established companies.

You will discuss the key challenges associated with creating and maintaining long-term vision and profitable growth in established enterprises, and then analyze the interplays among the business, corporate, divisional, and personal levels of strategy-making.

The Challenge of Change and an Ambidextrous Organization

Over the course of two sessions, explore how, as a leader of your organization, you can balance the tension between the short tern and the long term. We will focus on the use of culture as a potential source of competitive advantage — or disadvantage.

Our emphasis will be on providing you with a framework and a set of tools for thinking about culture as a social control system, especially in the face of disruptive change. Building on a congruence framework, you will also explore how leaders can use organizational culture as a powerful social control system within business units.

Design Thinking

Get a firsthand experience of the key tenets of design thinking, and find out how you can incorporate them into your work. Using design thinking as a framework, you will tackle a hands-on innovation challenge that will allow you to explore the principles of human-centered design, including empathy, rapid prototyping, collaboration, iteration, and feedback.

You will also engage in a conversation about disrupting the managerial status quo, amplifying your organization’s strengths and addressing some critical obstacles.