Overview:

Innovating inside established organizations is no easy feat. Creating new ideas, products, services, or business lines is especially challenging when they break with traditional ways of working, risk cannibalizing existing sources of revenue, or involve uncertain and potentially high-stakes investments. Business history is littered with once-successful companies (like Blockbuster and Kodak) that failed to meet these challenges and innovate.

This course focuses on how to innovate at scale within established organizations, that is, how to build repeatable, sustainable innovation capabilities that deliver real, measurable value. We will focus on tackling three essential questions:

1. When should you innovate?
2. How can you make innovation happen?
3. Who should you partner with?

Through a combination of foundational theory, real-world cases, guest speakers, and a persuasion-focused exercise, we will build both conceptual understanding and practical tools. Emphasis will be placed on developing an innovation mindset: a career-differentiating ability to challenge the status quo, experiment smartly, and drive change from within established organizations across industries and geographies.

Career Focus:

This course is designed for students pursuing roles in general management, corporate strategy, innovation, or venture functions within established firms; as strategy consultants serving such clients; or as operators in private equity portfolio companies. It will also benefit students looking to champion new ideas in complex, hierarchical environments.

Educational Objectives:

This course has three overarching learning objectives. By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Make strategic decisions about when to lead with innovation.
• Build internal capabilities for product, process, and business model innovation.
• Forge high-leverage partnerships (through alliances, CVC, or strategic collaborations) to accelerate innovation.

Course Content and Organization:

This course will have three modules that support the key learning objectives of the class:

Module 1: When to innovate?

In this module, students will learn to determine when to lead and when to follow and how to enhance their effectiveness in driving innovation. Topics include: early mover advantage, follower advantage, imitation, and dominant design.

Module 2: How to innovate?

In this module, students will learn how to internally design innovation as a system by aligning enablers, choosing physical, digital, and network locations, building organizational architecture, and managing portfolios to create coherence and sustained impact. The module concludes with an in-class interactive exercise. Topics include: developing capabilities, location choice, workplace design, portfolio management, and build vs. buy decisions.

Module 3: Who to innovate with?

In this module, students will turn their focus to outside the organization and learn how to evaluate and select innovation partners. Topics include: partnering with philanthropic organizations and academia, running corporate venture capital funds, acquisitions and open source.

The course concludes with a wrap-up session synthesizing key learnings.

Scope:

This course will draw from industries such as automotive, beauty, gaming, energy, healthcare, technology, creative sectors, and more. We will cover geographies such as Argentina, China, Germany, South Korea, and the United States.

Grading / Course Administration

Grading will be based on participation and a take home final (50/50)

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