This course deals with the challenge of bringing to market elegant and efficient solutions to strong customer needs. This challenge is relevant whether you work for a startup or a large company, whether you sell products or services, and whether your customers are individual consumers or companies.

We structure our learning around the following basic steps of the innovation process:

1. Opportunity identification / Idea generation

2. Design

3. Testing

4. Launch

We will take on the challenge of trying to develop a new product during the week! You will apply the tools and frameworks covered in the course to progress through the innovation process. A set of projects will be offered by companies. You will select your project (and form teams of 6 students) before the course starts, based on materials provided by the companies. You will visit your “client” company at the beginning of the course, and representatives from the company will attend your final presentations at the end of the course. Alternatively, you may propose your own project (e.g., startup idea). Please contact me as soon as possible ([email protected]) if you would like to do so.

Olivier Toubia

Glaubinger Professor of Business, Chair of the Marketing Division

Olivier Toubia is the Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, where he also serves as the chair of the Marketing Division. His research focuses on various aspects of innovation, including preference measurement and idea generation. Specifically, he combines methods from social sciences and data science, in order to study human processes such as motivation, choice, and creativity. He currently serves as a...

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