Columbia Business School

Overview

Reinventing Innovation is based on the assumption that multiple organizational models can be used to integrate innovation into an organization at various stages of the process and encourages an individualized strategic approach.

It delineates six sharply distinct organizational structures and the different types of innovations they produce. It considers when and how program participants should customize these configurations to their organizational and competitive environments, and the personal skills, traits, and aptitudes they need to do so successfully.

The approach allows organizations to view the innovation process distinctly for their own needs and culture, giving it a greater opportunity to thrive organically, and offer repeat benefit. The program also teaches executives about the delicate balance between innovation and cost efficiency. Participants also leave with an actionable plan they can implement when they return.

To make the program as impactful as possible, participants with work faculty members and doctoral students before, during, and after the program on their specific objectives.

Audience

Upper- to senior-level management in organizations that have been unable to move quickly and innovate. Those in fast-moving, innovation-driven industries such as technology, healthcare, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, consumer products or telecommunications industries would especially benefit from the curriculum.

Benefits

The program tackles innovation on a personalized level. Participants focus in on their specific challenges and needs and do a thorough innovation audit on their capabilities.

• Gain a new understanding of innovation that will help you move your company into an innovation-centric organization

• Learn how to perform an innovation audit.

• Practice using the audit to identify ways to improve the ability to innovate.

• Use the audit to customize your organization in order to achieve its innovation needs.

• Create a customized individual and organizational plan to launch, intensify, or redirect innovation in your organization or unit.

• Join and draw from a community of Reinventing Innovation program participants.

Upon completion of this program, you will earn four days towards a Certificate in Business Excellence. Learn more.

Faculty

Eric Abrahamson Hughie E. Mills Professor of Business Management

Curriculum

Reinventing Innovation will help participants create greater efficiency and quality, achieve faster reorientation, provide better new business development, ensure faster market penetration, allow for greater profitability, and lay the foundation for more robust growth. Using Eric Abrahamson’s six-dimension innovation model, each participant will establish a disciplined, repeatable, and scalable innovation process.

Participants will also learn a step-by-step method to customize these six dimensions for their organizations and its sub-units. By doing so, executives will gain increased awareness of the distinct capabilities they should develop during the program in order to manage and lead each type of configuration successfully.

The work begins not long after applications are accepted. Program staff will contact participants to better understand their objectives regarding innovation challenges at their organizations. Faculty members and doctoral students will interview participants to learn more about the specific challenges. Doctoral students also will conduct preliminary research on the topics.

During the program, coursework, presentations, and a daily workshop will ensure that participants are on-track to address their specific challenges. Participants will be contacted four months after the program ends to review and redirect their work. They will also be invited to participant in the reinventing innovation community.

Sample Session Titles:

Day 1
Reinventing Innovation: Selecting the Right Techniques to Innovate at the Specific Stage in Your Firm’s or units' Life-Cycle.
• Recognizing your personal strengths and challenges in leading innovation at each life-cycle stage
• Capitalizing on pre-program preparations for focusing innovation at your firm
• Techniques for the inventing innovations stage – tools for intuition, creativity, and improvisation

Day 2
Strategies for Innovating at the Commercialization and Growth Stages: Real Option Tools for Selecting which Innovations to Commercialize and Grow
• Techniques for innovating at the optimization stage – cost-efficient tools to innovate in product, process, and service design
• Capitalizing on pre-program preparation for diagnosing where to make and let innovation happen at your firm
• Exemplary innovative firms at each life cycle stage – creating self-reinforcing configurations of organizational culture, structure, processes, people, and social networks
• Listening to and conversing with some jazz musicians – what they can teach us about improvisation, creativity, and innovation

Day 3
Disciplined Innovation: How Precisely is One Large Firm Maximizing Creativity and Efficiency at the Optimization Stage
• The innovation mindset – exiting old markets and inventing new ones at the invention to optimization stage transition
• apitalizing on pre-program preparations to customize innovation techniques for your firm
• Organizational ecosystems – how networks of organizations can co-create innovations at each life-cycle stage
• Comedy Club – the serious impact of fun on innovation

Day 4
How the Imitation of Innovations Destroys Competitive Advantage: Stage-Based Strategies for Inimitable Innovating.
• Practical Lessons from Entrepreneurship
• Capitalizing on pre-program preparations to implement techniques to make and let innovation happen at your firm
• Presentations of practicum work accomplished during the program
• Planning post-program follow up at each participants’ firm