Driving the Innovation Process is a graduate-level course for MBA and graduate level engineering and science students designed to provide you with the understanding, skills and tools to implement an innovation process. This course combines insights from recent research in innovation, marketing, management, economics and sociology with cutting-edge tools and techniques being employed by leading companies around the world. By the time you complete this course, you will be able to implement an innovation process that will help you succeed as a technologist, manager, executive or entrepreneur.

Course Summary

Imagine you’re an entrepreneur in search of a compelling new opportunity around which to build a business… or a scientist or engineer with a breakthrough new technology… or a corporate executive looking to drive double digit growth within a stagnant sector… or a venture capitalist seeking to evaluate a potentially revolutionary new offering.

How do you turn an initial idea or opportunity into a true innovation that creates real value? How do you identify and address unmet needs within the marketplace – as well as in markets that do not yet exist? How can you predict your potential customers’ reactions to a product that doesn’t exist, before you can even show them a prototype? How can you evaluate alternatives at the earliest conceptual stages of development? And, most importantly, how can you (and your company) become consistent, repeat innovators, doing this not just once but repeatedly over the course of years?

The answer to these and many other questions is to make innovation a process – something more than just the ad-hoc, intuitive, ‘gut-feel’ of an individual. In this course we get down to the brass tacks of a process for innovation – the practical methods and tools you can use on a daily basis to improve your ability to discover, gather, build and synthesize the knowledge that enables innovation. This course will provide you with the solid foundation you need to become a consistent, repeat innovator.

Course Description

Driving the Innovation Process is a 3-credit, 14-week-long course that meets 14 times, for 3 hours per session. The class format is highly interactive and will vary from session to session. You should expect to encounter:

• Presentations by the instructors and guest speakers
• Full-class discussions and exercises
• Small-group dialogs and activities
• Role-play simulations, student presentations, and more

To help make the course material as relevant as possible, we will employ many examples of technologies and companies that reflect the concepts being discussed. Within each session we will discuss examples from modern life, including everything from Dyson vacuums, the iPod, and the Segway Human Transporter, to the Grameen Bank, the U.S. Postal Service, and Multi-Strike Poker. In addition, throughout the course we will follow a running example in greater detail, in order to understand how an actual company with a cutting-edge technology is applying the process and tools described in this course.

Course Materials

This course does not use a textbook. Instead, we will rely on a set of engaging and informative readings contained in the course pack, as well as from materials that can be accessed via the course web site.

Course Pack – A copy of the course pack can be purchased. It contains required readings that you should read prior to each class session. These readings consist of carefully selected magazine/journal articles and excerpts from trade books in the areas of innovation, marketing, management, eco-nomics, history, and sociology. These materials are copyrighted by their respective authors/publishers, so the price of the course pack covers any applicable licensing fees as well as printing costs.

Supplemental Materials – Administrative documents and other helpful materials are available on the course website. Please visit the site to take full advantage of these resources.

Media Sources – Self-directed readings from other media will also be integral to this course. Students are asked to select, explore, and analyze real-world situations in light of the central concepts presented in the course. You may be surprised by how everyday business events become more predictable in this new context.

Course Activities

Team Project
Students will work in teams of four to apply the innovation concepts and tools taught in the course to a specific, real-world technology. Students will participate in the boundary definition, concept mapping, ideation, knowledge elicitation, and modeling processes. Based on their experiences, students will produce a set of core innovation documents, including community and technology maps, an engagement display, a community member profile, and an influence diagram. At the end of the course, each team will share its work with the entire class.

Innovation Journal & Essay
During the course, each student will maintain an “innovation journal” in which he or she will note thoughts or observations about current real-world business and social events that illustrate key concepts related to innovation – that is, to the concepts in the course, to innovative ideas, products or services, etc. These entries may be triggered by items in the media, personal conversations, class engagements, and the like. Toward the end of the 14 weeks, each student will be responsible for writing a 1,000-word essay (about four pages), based on one or more ideas captured in the journal, that connect insights from the class with their journal observations and thoughts.

In-Class Innovation Events
Part of the innovation process involves innovation events that consist of group sessions. Three of these events will be held during class hours at the appropriate times during the course. An Ideation Session, a Design and Problem Solving Session and a Decision and Planning session will be held. These will be ‘hands-on’ working sessions and students will be expected to participate in these events.

Course Sessions

What is going on in innovation research today? What exactly is innovation and why is it so hard to be a consistent, repeat innovator? What are the situations that innovators face? What do companies and individuals need to do to deal with the new and rapidly evolving world?
Topics:

Introductions
About the course
What is Innovation?
Innovation today

Required Readings:

Drucker, Peter. "The Discipline of Innovation," Harvard Business Review (1985). Reprint #0208F.

Excerpt from Utterback, James. Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation (HBS Press, 1994): Chap. 1, "The Dynamics of Innovation in Industry" (pp. 1-21).

Excerpt from European Commission (Directorate-general for Enterprise). Innovation Management & the Knowledge-Driven Community (Jan. 2004): Part I, "Innovation Management in the Knowledge-Driven Economy" (pp. 17-54).

Innovation is ultimately a knowledge process. The difficulty arises in the type of knowledge that you need to learn and where that knowledge resides. Over 90% of the knowledge you need to know in order to innovate is inside people’s heads and over 90% of that knowledge resides in the unconscious mind or is ‘tacit’. What is the knowledge you need to know, where is it, how is it structured, how do you get at it and what do you do with it once you have it?
Topics:

Innovation is a knowledge process
Types of knowledge, their attributes and structure
Knowledge functions: gathering, managing, assimilating
Knowledge synthesis -- An introduction to systems thinking

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Nonaka, Ikujiro & Takeuchi, Hirotaka. The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (Oxford U. Press, 1995): Chap. 3: "Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation," pp. 56-94.

Excerpt from Chatzkel, Jay L. Knowledge Capital: How Knowledge-Based Enterprises Really Get Built (Oxford U. Press, 2003): Chap. 7, "Understanding the Enterprise as a System," by Vince Barabba (pp. 129-153).

We will learn what an innovation process is and how it works. We will review a number of innovation processes proposed and in use by various corporations. We will introduce and discuss a specific innovation process and discuss it’s attributes of non-linearity, knowledge driven timing, cycles of activities and how such a process integrates with other corporate processes (such as the NPD or New Product Development process).
Topics:

A review of innovation processes
The innovation process and the corporation
An innovation process: The 9-fold Order
The time domain: events, projects, process

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Foster, Richard & Kaplan, Sarah. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market -- And How to Successfully Transform Them (Currency, 2001): Chap. 1, "Survival and Performance in the Era of Discontinuity" (pp. 7-24); Chap. 3, "Cultural Lock-In," (pp. 61-89); Chap. 5, "The Gales of Destruction" (pp. 125-142).

Excerpt from Vogel, Craig; Cagan, Jonathan; & Boatwright, Peter. The Design of Things to Come (Wharton School Publishing, 2005): Chap. 2, “Pragmatic Innovation -- The New Mandate” (pp. 21-45); Chap. 3, “The Art and Science of Business” (pp. 47 – 66).

How do you launch an innovation initiative? What are the preparatory steps to take before diving into the process? Understanding the strategic intent and context within which innovation will take place is critical to success.

One of the key drivers of any innovation process is technology. Understanding technology as a transformation of material, information or behavior, and being able to understand the effects of those transformations is absolutely necessary.

This session will introduce effective methods and tools to define strategic intent and context, and to precisely understand a technology’s effects.

Topics:

Launching an innovation initiative
The strategic context
Technology’s role in innovation
Using technology knowledge

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (Little, Brown, 2005): Chap. 4, "Paul Van Riper's Big Victory: Creating Structure for Spontaneity" (pp. 99-146).

Excerpt from Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004): Chap. 2, "The Difference Difference Makes: Waggle Dances, the Bay of Pigs, and the Value of Diversity" (pp. 23-39).

Excerpt from Cooper, Alan. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams, 1999): Chap. 2, "Cognitive Friction" (pp. 19-38); Chap. 9, "Designing for Pleasure" (pp. 123-148).

Where do we find the diverse communities of experts, users, partners and even competitors that we should engage with? How do we use this community to experiment and gain knowledge? What do we do with the knowledge we gain? Community R&D is the corollary of Technology R&D, and is just as important. In this session we will learn how to build a knowledge community and tap into the community’s rich diversity of knowledge and perspectives. We will walk through constructing an effective engagement display.

Topics:

The what & why of community R&D
The nature of communities
Building a community and community mapping
Engaging the community

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Wenger, Etienne, et al. Cultivating Communities of Practice (HBS Press, 2002): Chap. 1, "Communities of Practice and Their Value to Organizations" (pp. 1-22); Chap. 3, "Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice" (pp. 49-64).

Excerpt from Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 2004): Chap. 3, "Monkey See, Monkey Do: Imitation, Information Cascades, and Independence" (pp. 40-65).

Excerpt from Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point (Little, Brown, 2000): Chap. 2, "The Law of the Few: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen" (pp. 30-88).

Excerpt from Buchanan, Mark. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks (W.W. Norton, 2002): Chap. 2, "The Strength of Weak Ties" (pp. 34-47).

The most effective thing that you can do as an innovator is to learn how to engage with people so that you learn what they know – and how they think. In this session, we will introduce concepts that are critical to get at this knowledge. We will teach various techniques of elicitation and have a hands-on session where you will use these techniques using a real-world example taken from a current situation. Finally, we will discuss how to use the concept of ‘Personas’ to codify what is known about how people view, value and adopt a new innovation.

Topics:

Customer choice: understanding future decisions
Elicitation: Getting knowledge from a person
Personas: making sense of diversity
The community member profile

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Zaltman, Gerald. How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market; (HBS Press, 2003): Chap. 7, "Reading the Mind of the Market" (pp. 149-163); Chap. 9, "Memory, Metaphor & Stories" (pp. 189-210).

Excerpt from Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown, 2005): Chap. 3, "The Warren Harding Error" (pp. 74-98); Conclusion, "Listening With Your Eyes" (pp. 245-254).

Team meetings, project discussion & status updates.

There is a rhythm to an innovation process that unfolds over time. As the process unfolds, knowledge matures: ideas turn into product concepts and opportunities turn into markets. The day-to-day activities contribute to the overall process evolution and are punctuated by specific events and milestones. Understanding this rhythm helps to make sure the process moves forward as fast as is practical and necessary.

As part of this session, we will have a hands-on innovation event – an Ideation session. We will take what is known about a new customer need/desire and work through a structured brainstorming event. We will discuss the proper preparation for such a session, the do’s and don’ts and what to do with the results of these sessions.
Topics:

The “Breathe-in, Breathe-out” Rhythm
Timelines and deadlines in a knowledge driven process
Innovation events
Mapping solutions: from idea to concept to product

Required Readings:

Excerpt from DeGraff, Jeff & Lawrence, Katherine. Creativity at Work (Jossey Bass, 2002): Chap. 3, "Imagine Practices" (pp. 55-80).

Excerpt from Kemper, Steve. Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind the Segway... (HBS Press, 2003): Brief excerpt from HBS Working Knowledge website.

Excerpt from Bornstein, David. How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford University Press, 2004): Chap. 10, "Are They Possessed, Really Possessed, by an Idea?" (pp. 117-125); Chap. 18, "Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs (pp. 233-241); Chap. 20, "Blueprint Copying" (pp. 256-263).

As you gather, discover, create and build knowledge, how do you manage that knowledge? What can you do with it? How do you use it to gain insight? In this session we will learn various methods and tools that aid you in organizing, analyzing and synthesizing the knowledge you are gathering. We will specially focus on using knowledge synthesis methods for turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and then using that knowledge in collaborative efforts to gain insight and understanding about plausible futures. The focus of this session is on using Systems thinking skills to build dynamic models of causality that will be used to gain insight into plausible futures.

Topics:

Why model, what to model
Building dynamic innovation models
Putting knowledge into a model
Validating a model: precision and accuracy

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Schrage, Michael. Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate; (HBS Press, 1999): Chap. 1, "The New Economics of Innovation" (pp. 11-36); Chap. 2, "A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge" (pp. 37-57).

Excerpt from Richmond, Barry. The Thinking in Systems Thinking (Pegasus, 2000): "The 'Thinking' in Systems Thinking: An Overview of Seven Skills" (pp. 4-9).

How do you model the mind of a customer to determine their response to an innovation? How do you aggregate these individual decisions to see how the market will evolve and what makes a difference?

As part of this session, we will have the second hands-on innovation event – a Design Burst session. We will use our knowledge of possible solution concepts and create specific product concepts.
Topics:

Evaluating an Idea, Concept and Product
Putting the customer's mind in the model
Linking effects to experiences to value
Adoption and diffusion - the dynamics of success

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Schwartz, Barry. The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (Harper Perennial 2005): Chap. 3, “Deciding and Choosing” (pp. 47-75); Chap. 8, “Why Decisions Disappoint: The Problem of Adaptation” (pp. 167-179).

Excerpt from Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations, Fourth Edition (The Free Press, 1995). Chap. 6, "Attributes of Innovation and Their Rate of Adoption" (pp. 204-251).

Models can't predict the future, they can merely show plausible futures but any model, even simple spreadsheet-based models, can lead to insights if they are constructed and used properly. A good model can be used to explore potential future scenarios and uncover emergent behavior and unintended consequences. In this session you will learn how to use models as a guide to determine what makes a difference and how the future could be influenced?

Topics:

Using a model
Scenarios and storyboards
Evaluating and prioritizing alternatives
Creating a Valuation Assessment

Required Readings:

Sturman, J. "All Models Are Wrong," System Dynamics Review, Vol. 18, No. 4, (Winter 2002), pp. 501–531.

Excerpt from Schrage, Michael. Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (HBS Press, 1999): "User's Guide" (pp. 201-213).

How do you use all of this knowledge to make decisions? What are some effective tools for rationally prioritizing alternatives? How do you move the chosen concepts into the product development process? This session will focus on these and other issues in the final phase of moving an idea into reality.

Part of this session will be a hands-on innovation event – a Decision session – where you will participate in a group exercise to evaluate, prioritize and decide on critical aspects of the products under consideration.
Topics:

The dynamics of decision making
Preparing for action
Connecting to the operational excellence processes
Leading to the plan

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Taleb, Nassim. Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and Life (W.W. Norton, 2001): Chap. 2, "A Bizarre Accounting Method" (pp. 26-39); Chap. 7, "The Problem of Induction" (pp. 99-110).

Excerpt from McMillan, John. Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets (W.W. Norton, 2003): Chap. 1, "The Only Natural Economy" (pp. 3-14); Chap. 4, "Information Wants to Be Free" (pp. 41-52); Chap. 9, "The Embarrassment of a Patent" (pp. 103-118).

Team project presentations

Session 14 - Review & Exhortation
What do you do now? What do you do if your company, division or group lacks the ‘culture of innovation’? How can you be effective at the ‘grass roots’ level? What do you do if you’re all alone? We will discuss ways that you can be effective going forward and fostering change no matter what type of culture or environment you find yourself in.

Discussion and Questions and Answers. Class evaluation.
Topics:

Why Innovation Matters
The Value of Process
Culture, Leadership and Organization
Making a Difference

Required Readings:

Excerpt from Wheatley, Margaret J. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (Berrett-Koehler, 1999): Chap. 2, "Newtonian Organizations in a Quantum Age (pp. 27-47); Chap. 6, "The Creative Energy of the Universe--Information" (pp. 93-112); Chap. 8, "Change: The Capacity of Life" (pp. 137-155).