Two of the more prolific myths associated with innovation in organizations are that you must “think outside the box,” and that creativity is something you are born with (or not). This course will debunk these myths, by teaching you to innovate "INSIDE the box", leveraging your knowledge, resources, and expertise in proven step-by-step processes to quickly and effectively generate and implement truly creative ideas.

Through the materials and hands-on exercises, you will discover where creative ideas really come from and how to rapidly and repeatedly generate them on your own – for your own topics – using a set of thinking tools and principles.

Specifically, you will learn:

• The differences between traditional ideas and creative ideas
• Barriers to innovative thinking, how to identify them and overcome them
• How constraints, conceptualization, and visualization can help you see more opportunities around you
• Function Follows Form – a complementary approach to innovation that supplements your existing “Voice of the Customer (VOC)” and technology research & development efforts
• Tools and principles for systematic inventive thinking, in order to structure the creative thinking process
• How to cultivate creativity at every level of the organization through fixed and growth mindsets, diverse teams, using rewards and the need for autonomy

Post Program Coaching

Participants have the option to receive personalized coaching from our partners at SIT following the program. Find out more on the SIT website.

Please Contact Us

Please contact our Learning Solutions Specialists at 212-854-3395 for a personal conversation to learn more.

IMPACT

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 to teach you exactly how to do that.

At the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Discover and surmount self-imposed roadblocks that prevent you from seeing creative ideas right in front of you.
• Apply a systematic method that will help you find differentiated, interesting solutions to problems and new opportunities in your work.
• Develop mindsets and create cultural structures to improve the pathway of innovation for yourself and your organization.
• Communicate to your colleagues how innovation can be accomplished through structure, rather than chaos.

Upon completion of this program, you will earn one day towards a Certificate with select alumni and tuition benefits. Learn more.

PROGRAM STRUCTURE

The program faculty will provide expertise and many examples to teach you valuable creativity skills and – more importantly – they will share decades of their own research and experience working on individual, team, and organizational levels to help companies cultivate a self-sustaining practice of innovation alongside curiosity, openness and other habits that make businesses flourish (and make the workplace more rewarding and enjoyable).

This asynchronous program runs over the course of eight weeks and includes three live webinars in addition to the recorded sessions. It includes many hands-on exercises with detailed feedback on projects provided by the faculty and facilitators.

Get a first look at the program with this excerpt of a recorded session:

Week 1: Program Introduction and Welcome

• Introduction to Instructors and Learning Tools

Week 2: Introduction to Creativity – Where Do Ideas Come From?

• Creativity in business is not blue-sky thinking, and it's not "outside of the box" thinking either—it's nearer than you expect! The secret to your next creative idea lies in taking a better look inside the environment of your problem, product or innovation needs.

Week 3: Fixedness – Structural Fixedness vs Functional Fixedness

• Learn what fixedness is, why it comes so naturally and how breaking it could be the key to your next creative idea.

Week 4: Tools – Basic Tools For Defining Problems and Generating Ideas

• How to transform traditional brainstorming sessions by collecting your team's top-of-head solutions and asking, "What are we really doing through these ideas, and what else could we do instead?"

Week 5: Tools, Continued – Constraints for Generating Ideas, ECG Machine, TATA Nano

Week 6: Method – Researching Creative Ideas to Turn Patterns Into Tools, Function Follows Form Process

• Look to the theory of creative ideas to find reproducible patterns in innovations that can be turned into templates for future problem-solving. These templates and the process in which to effectively apply them will form the bulk of the unit's learning.

Week 7: Method, Continued – Subtraction Template, Task Unification, and Division Template for the FFF Process

Week 8: Managing Creativity and Innovation – The Importance of Creativity and Overcoming Individual and Organizational Barriers to Creativity

• Examine how individual and organizational mindsets can help or inhibit creative skill development and engagement. This unit will cover the C.O.R.E. creative traits and fixed and growth mindsets, as well as the key strategies organizational managers can implement to stimulate them.

For a complete program schedule download the agenda.

Post Program Coaching

Participants have the option to receive personalized coaching from our partners at SIT following the program. Find out more on the SIT website.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE & TESTIMONIALS

Innovate on Demand (Online) is designed for middle- to upper-level executives who are responsible for strategic innovation and new product development.

Columbia Business School alumni and up to four of their colleagues are eligible for a 25 percent tuition benefit for programs lasting up to seven days. More on the Alumni Tuition Benefit.

What Past Participants Are Saying

“The Innovate on Demand course revealed to me that as a business owner, entrepreneur, and leader, my personal learning needs to continue full throttle so that I can cultivate a richer, continuously creative and open culture. Bravo, Columbia, for rigorously examining the creative process in a way that propels participants to truly think and not be passive in the learning journey! I simply loved the program and will be forever grateful for the many challenges it provided me that have directly resulted in immediate innovation in my company.”
- Barbara Warren, Director of Dramatic Difference Training

FACULTY

Gita V. Johar, Faculty Director
Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business in Marketing

Gita V. Johar is an influential scholar in the field of consumer psychology who has published several articles on consumer responses to marketing efforts. Her expertise in persuasion makes her uniquely qualified to lead a program on marketing and innovation, where the focus is on generating creative ideas as well as persuading consumers and colleagues to accept these ideas.

Johar has served as associate editor for such journals as the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research and the International Journal of Research in Marketing. She began a term as editor of the Journal of Consumer Research in July 2014. At Columbia, Gita teaches in the MBA, EMBA and PhD programs and has authored cases on consumer adoption of new products and on marketing and advertising planning.

Johar is the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and has been on the faculty since 1992. She received her PhD from the NYU Stern School of Business and her MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Hear more from the faculty director:

Jacob Goldenberg
Professor of Marketing, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Visiting Professor, Columbia Business School

Jacob Goldenberg is a marketing professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya and a visiting professor at Columbia University. He studies creativity, new product development, innovation, market complexity, and the effects of social networks.

His research has been featured in leading scholarly journals such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Management Science, Journal of Marketing, Nature Physics and Science. His work has been featured in a variety of popular media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe.

Meet Jacob in this video:

Yoni Stern
Partner at Systematic Inventive Thinking and SVP of Business Development
Adjunct Professor, Columbia Business School

Yoni Stern is a partner at SIT and VP Business Development. Since 2001, he has pioneered the strategic development of the SIT approach with multinationals helping them achieve breakthrough results while developing an organizational culture of innovation. He combines a profound academic knowledge of the SIT methodology with a deep insight into how innovation can help to solve corporate issues and problems. As a senior consultant and facilitator of the SIT method, he has worked virtually everywhere with scores of companies including AXA, Disney, GE, Johnson & Johnson, Intel, Kraft Foods, and Procter & Gamble.

Yoni is a keynote speaker at conferences (ISPIM - International Society for Professional Innovation Managers; PSTC- Pressure Sensitive Tape Council; PDMA - Product Development and Management Association). He also guest lectures at business schools and is adjunct professor at Columbia University.

Meet Yoni in this video:

Along with Professor Gita Johar, Professor Goldenberg, and Professor Stern additional Columbia Business School faculty contribute to and teach in the program.

SPECIAL FEATURES

Practitioner's Corner

Throughout this online program, we will share insights from Drew Boyd, a global leader in creativity and innovation who guides teams, global businesses and governments to deliver breakthrough results. He is a 30-year industry veteran, including 17 years with Johnson & Johnson in marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and international development, and the co-author of Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results.

During each module, you will have access to several video interviews with Drew Boyd where he talks about his experiences in managing innovation in organizations and implementing the SIT techniques in the workplace, from a practitioner's perspective. He gives practical implementation advice that complements the course learnings about what creative ideas are, where to find them, and the tools to generate them quickly – or on demand.

FAQs