Innovation and Design Thinking MOOC to Return This Fall
The University of Cincinnati’s popular Massive Online Open Course called “Innovation and Design Thinking” will return this Fall beginning in October.
Stay tuned for details about registration.
The University of Cincinnati’s popular Massive Online Open Course called “Innovation and Design Thinking” will return this Fall beginning in October.
Stay tuned for details about registration.
I’m looking forward to teaching “Innovation Tools,” the graduate marketing course at the University of Cincinnati. The course teaches how to use Systematic Inventive Thinking, a method based on three ideas. First, most successful innovations over time followed one of five patterns, and these patterns are like the DNA of products that can be re-applied to innovate any product or service. Second, innovation happens when we start with a configuration (the “solution”) and work backwards to the “problem” that it solves. It turns out that humans are better at this than the traditional “problem-to-solution” approach to innovating. Finally, better innovation happens when we start within the world of the problem (the Closed World). Innovations that use elements of the problem or surrounding environment are more novel and surprising. We innovate “inside the box,” not outside.
Students learn not only how to innovate, but they also learn how to link it to marketing strategy. We teach the Big Picture marketing framework so that students know how to tie innovation and strategy and create an innovation roadmap.
We have 50 graduate students, mostly from our master of science of marketing program plus candidates from other colleges. Student teams are working on the following projects:
The output from each team is a “Dream Catalog,” a hypothetical portrayal of the best of the ideas in graphic form. This is a technique we teach so that students know how to bring innovations to life and align an organization to gain support.
As in past courses, the final exam is a complete and comprehensive demonstration of “innovating on demand.” Students are given a product that they do not know ahead of time. They have three hours to use each of the five SIT patterns correctly to create completely new-to-the-world innovations in that category. You can see the output of these final exams and the dream catalogs at our innovation wiki.
SIT will hold its 7th Innovation Suite in Berlin, Germany from October 24-26, 2011. Participants will learn the tools and principles of the SIT method step-by-step. They will also learn how to implement an innovation program within their companies. It is an intensive learning experience with some of SIT’s most experienced facilitators.
Here is what a participant had to say about it:
Agenda (from the SIT website):
Day 1 – Learn SIT to think and act differently
By 5:30pm you will know how to apply:
– SIT principles and thinking tools for New Product Development
– SIT’s approach to Problem Solving
Day 2 – SIT-in-action
The second day will be conducted mostly by SIT-trained innovation leaders from large organizations around the world.
By 5:30pm you will know how SIT works on different scales and levels of organizations after you have:
– Heard first-hand testimonials, challenges, and case-studies of innovation managers.
– Learned additional SIT tools from the experienced innovation leaders.
Day 3 – Putting it all to work
The third day is all about you and your team, and how to harness your team’s knowledge and resources to meet your business goals, improve the results of strategic projects, and find creative ways to use new thinking in everyday situations.
By 5:30pm you will know how to manage a short innovation process after you have:
– Learned how to identify needs and opportunities for innovation
– Led an innovation session on a real business topic of your own
– Learned what needs to be done to ensure results
After the program, participants will receive personal coaching to help apply the new skills in their organizations and implement an innovation program.
The Centre for International Business and the International Economy at the University of Pavia is conducting a comprehensive study on how companies leverage innovation as a competitive weapon. It seeks to uncover the different strategic models and managerial practices adopted by the most successful and innovative firms to achieve a competitive advantage.
I encourage you to participate by following this link: Innovation Survey
The survey will be followed by companies like Microsoft, Alessi, Accenture, Siemens AG, and Deutsche Bank. The survey is a replica of a similar one conducted in Italy in 2009 that involved over 120 companies. Results are expected mid March.
The University of Pavia, one of Italy’s oldest and best, has a strong offering in innovation. Dr. Stefano Denicolai, Professor of Innovation Management, teaches a course on “Innovation Management.” The aim of the course is to develop specific skills in the field of innovation process, management, and entrepreneurial activities at the global level. The program proposes basic notions, theoretical models and case studies about topics such as: development of new product, implementation of new processes, network management, appropriability of the competitive advantage.
Course topics include:
In case you are wondering what the word appropriability means, it is defined as: the environmental factors that govern an innovator’s ability to capture profits generated by an innovation.
Here are the goals of the course:
The course fee is $2,800 which includes course tuition; coaching hours; SIT materials including an internal “mini-session facilitation kit”; 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches and 1 dinner. The course fee will be rebated back to you if your company orders a project from SIT by May 1st 2011.
A survey from IBM’s Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all others – creativity. It is therefore timely that the City University London formed its Centre for Creativity with a goal of becoming the UK leader in the teaching, research and transfer of creativity in professional practice, ranging from informatics and engineering to business and the arts. City is already a world-class centre of applied creativity research through activities in informatics, business, psychology, music and the arts.
To achieve this objective it aims to achieve the following 3 sub-objectives:
Here is an opportunity to learn innovation directly from the people who taught me. The course is called Innovation Suite 2010 and will be held in New York City from May 24-26, 2010. You can register for it at https://www.sitsite.com/academy/.
Here are the goals of the course:
The course fee is $2,800 which includes course tuition; coaching hours; SIT materials including an internal “mini-session facilitation kit”; 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches and 1 dinner. The course fee will be rebated back to you if your company orders a project from SIT by October 1st 2010.
Here is an opportunity to learn innovation from the same people who taught me. The course is called Innovation Suite 2009, and will be held July 27-29, 2009 in Rochester, Minnesota. For registration and more detailed information, please go to www.sitsite.com/2009innovationsuite.
Here are some excerpts about the course from the registration site:
Innovation Suite 2009 will help you successfully apply innovation to three critical levels in your company: individual, team, and organization-wide. Each day of this 3-day course focuses primarily on one level. We will take you step-by-step from the basic tools and principles of the SIT method through hands-on team innovation and company-wide sustainable processes.