Columbia Business School

Overview

In order to succeed, innovation has to be pervasive and consistent in an organization.  This three-day marketing program will help participants harness creativity and innovation to add value for management and customers. Participants will learn how to drive innovation by generating creative solutions to the challenges of new product design and positioning.

Participants will gain tools and frameworks to tackle marketing challenges more creatively, by generating product-centered as well as market-centered insights. You will also learn the art of persuasion to help you drive innovation through the organization. Finally, you will learn to put an end to self-imposed road blocks that prevent you from reaching your full creative potential.

This is a hands-on program that provides tools that managers can take with them to the workplace to increase generation of 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.

Audience

Middle- to upper-level executives who are responsible for strategic innovation and new product development. This program is especially good for organizations that wish to send a cross-functional team to work on a specific challenge or project together.

Benefits

Innovation is too often a game of chance: people and companies occasionally stumble upon great ideas and opportunities, almost by accident. However, in today’s business world you cannot rely on serendipitous innovation to remain competitive. Instead, you need to be able to innovate “on demand,” wherever and whenever you need or want. This program is designed exactly to teach you how to do that.

In particular, you will learn about:
• 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

In addition, you will join a community of like-minded participants who will interact online and offline before, during and after the program.

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

Faculty

	Gita V. Johar Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business in Marketing Senior Vice Dean Dean's Office
	Jacob Goldenberg Visiting Professor Marketing
	Ran Kivetz Philip H. Geier, Jr. Professor of Marketing
	Olivier Toubia Glaubinger Professor of Business Marketing

Curriculum

Throughout the Marketing and Innovation program, participants will apply their learnings to a real-world project. In order to maximize the benefits from these projects, participants will be required to prepare for the program as follows:

• Participants will be assigned to teams based on their interests in a given industry or product. Participants who join the program from the same organization will be assigned to the same team and encouraged to identify an innovation project relevant to their organization.
• Each team will be asked to conduct a pre-project market analysis of their industry. This will include sizing the market, identifying the supply chain, the key competitors and they key dimensions on which they compete, market segmentation, and identifying new trends and developments (both among consumers and manufacturers).

All sessions during the program will take place in a workshop format. Faculty will provide an overview of the topic as well as the most recent research in the area and set up an environment for discussion using a case, an exercise or a simulation. Throughout the program, participants will also work on developing new ideas in their chosen category using different techniques and tools as well as screening these ideas by running them through different filters. Participants will leave with new ideas and tools they can use immediately upon their return to the workplace.

Sample Session Titles:

Introduction: Imperative for Innovation
• Why should organizations innovate?
• What are the strategic alternatives?
• What are sources of innovative ideas?

Market Analysis
• What value do we deliver to our customers and how can we better understand consumer needs?
• What are the limitations of traditional approaches to understanding customers?
• How do we understand the competition, our core competencies and the best way to position our products?

Open Innovation and the Consumer
• How can we involve consumers in the front end of the innovation process and which consumers should be involved and how?
• What type of information should we expect from consumers and how do we extract this information?
• What type of incentives may be used to motivate consumers?

Close-World Innovation in New Products and Services
• What are the different creative techniques?
• What are creativity and innovation templates?
• How can I apply them to idea generation for new products and services and product positioning?

Opportunity Identification
• How can the frameworks of Blue Ocean Strategy and Disruptive Technologies be leveraged to identifying innovation opportunities?

Idea Screening and Experimentation
• What criteria should we use to screen and evaluate innovation ideas?
• When should experts vs. consumers be involved in idea evaluation?
• What experiments may be run to validate promising ideas?

Building a Culture of Innovation and Selling your Ideas
• How do individuals/managers make decisions and what are the specific decision-traps they fall into?
• What is risk and why are customers and managers risk averse?
• How can I harness the psychology of decision-making to make better decisions and to identify value added products and services?
• How can I influence others in the organization to support my ideas?
• What are the different strategic options for organizing for innovation?
• How can I reward/create the appropriate incentives for innovation?