Academic Focus: Columbia Business School on Marketing and Innovation

Columbia Business School is offering a three-day Executive Education program called Marketing and Innovation. The program will teach Systematic Inventive Thinking as well as other key innovation concepts.

The program will be held June 17-19 and November 18-20 in New York. The program is ideal for middle- to upper-level executives who are responsible for strategic innovation and new product development. It is especially good for organizations that wish to send a cross-functional team to work on a specific challenge or project together.

Participants will gain a complete toolkit to take with them in order to tackle marketing challenges more creatively, by generating product-centered as well as market-centered insights. They will also learn the art of persuasion to help them find support for innovation through the organization.

This is a hands-on, three-day program that will help participants generate creative solutions to problems – solutions that are both novel as well as useful. Each session provides a short conceptual framework followed by an introduction of practical tools and a workshop where the tools can be applied.

Key topics include:
• Leveraging various outside constituencies in innovation (e.g., customers, lead users).
• Finding big opportunities and ideas
• Generating Product, Market, and Customer Insights
• Screening Ideas and Rapid Experimentation
• Building a Culture of Innovation
Participants from last year’s program had this to say:

“Innovation can be learned. So many people are intimidated by the concept of innovation because they think you have to be this incredibly genius-type person. But we’ve learned all sorts of tools that everybody can use. As long as you think systematically and follow a process, you can come up with good results. This was gratifying to me: that I, too, can be innovative and that I can really be good at it.”
– Kathy Farley, Dow Jones and Company
“Marketing and Innovation was a great way to learn new techniques for innovative thinking in the business environment. I can’t wait to apply these concepts in my company.”
– Molly Poppie, The Nielsen Company
“Marketing and Innovation was completely eye opening. The biggest value was discovering that you can learn creativity and understanding that, as a good manager, you have to carve out time during your week [for innovation] and inspire your team. Allowing people to share ideas and that you’re trusting them: that’s something I’ve learned through this course.”
– Bettina Alonso, Oceana

“From my perspective, I’d describe the program as the future. A lot of the concepts I’ve learned are going to drive forward my business, our ideas and where we go.”
– Ben Healy, Clayton Utz