Innovation and Strategy Programme

Executive Certificate in leading Innovation, Change and Strategy

Design and execute strategy, lead change and generate new ideas to sustain your competitive advantage.

Overview

strategy dev Leaders are constantly being challenged to find new, agile ways to generate ideas and execute strategy to future-proof the business and continue to connect with customers in an ever-changing marketplace.

Our strategy courses give you the practical skills and fresh perspectives to deliver strategies, navigate change and identify opportunities for growth to create value and sustain productivity. In many industries, innovation drives competitive success. Successful innovators redefine what the market expects, while those who do not are rendered obsolete. Innovation, however, is about more than great ideas. To be successful innovators, companies must understand the dynamics of their market, and identify and respond to the best opportunities with well-crafted, well-implemented innovation strategies. This course helps participants develop the mentality needed to become a disruptive leader and inspire an organizational culture that values and encourages new ideas. They will learn to rethink the habits that have made them successful in the past, and challenge the conventional wisdom and creativity innovation industry models that have defined their business. This course will help managers learn how to think strategically about innovation. Participants will be introduced to state-of-the-art concepts in innovation and best practices across a range of industries.

Who should attend?

Chief Technology Officers, R&D directors CEOs, COOs, CIOs, marketing managers, HR Managers, product and service managers.
Other senior executives, and entrepreneurs who are responsible for technology, R&D, and supply-chain strategy, especially where coordinated technology development issues are essential
Senior executives in charge of innovation or new business development
Teams charged with planning and implementing innovation or value chain strategy
Division, business unit, functional, or geographic leadership team members

Benefits to Your Organization

Strategy elevates good leaders to exceptional performers. This program will help participant organizations:

Develop their organizational capacity to define and implement effective business strategies
Capture the competitive benefits of innovation and creativity in the workplace
Capitalize immediately on the deepened insights and skills brought back to the workplace
Support their teams through periods of organizational change
Develop a long-term plan for the sustainability of the organization

Strategy Project

This program is designed to build applied skills in strategy, innovation and change management. To this purpose, you will engage in a Strategy Project that focuses on the future of your organization. The project will consist of:

Opportunity statement: map out a significant strategic direction or opportunity for your company, and describe its strategic importance
Analysis: develop a business case in the face of your chosen challenge or opportunity
Recommendations: draft a proposal on how to tackle your plan, and outline the expected strategic outcomes

During the week you will receive one-on-one time with a faculty advisor to support your project. At the end of the program you will present your proposal to the group, and get feedback for moving it forward in your organization.

Modules

Building Game-Changing Organizations: Aligning Purpose, Performance, and People

Understand what it takes to build game-changing organizations.
Acquire resources and tools to articulate your company’s powerful story—what we call “collective ambition”
Examine how to integrate the “soft side” of leading (purpose, vision, culture) with the “hard side” (strategy, operational priorities, brand) into a powerful formula.
Understand the importance of building an authentic and energizing culture
Learn what it takes to make your company a world-class talent factory

Building, Leading, and Sustaining the Innovative Organization

Participants will learn about the options available for driving strategic innovation in the organization, including how to:

Combine the right mix of capabilities and critical functions to generate and commercialize innovative ideas more efficiently
Develop the processes and required to support these activities
Build cultures that encourage innovative behaviors
Overcome the six misconceptions that stymie innovation in order to help the organization identify process information, identify opportunities, and deal with risk and uncertainty in a more timely manner

Driving Strategic Innovation: Achieving High Performance Throughout the Value Chain

Participants will leave this program armed with the knowledge of how to influence corporate culture, alter the way their organization responds to the challenge of innovation, and strengthen relationships with partners along the value chain. This intensive learning experience will deliver long-term value, helping business leaders to:

Meet technology challenges, from R&D to manufacturing, project management to engineering
Link technology decisions with business strategy
Integrate product development, process developments, and value-chain strategy
Develop organization and supply-chain strategies to position the company for future growth
Leverage learning and innovation collaboration with customers, lead users, and suppliers, maximizing the value of research
Understand how technologies and markets evolve and how they are linked
Outperform the competition by generating breakthrough ideas
Cope with shorter product life cycles, while delivering greater customer satisfaction
Optimize sourcing and “make-buy” decisions
Integrate supply-chain design with concurrent engineering
Engage talent within the organization and across the value chain

Disruptive Leadership: Fostering a Culture of Game-Changing Innovation

Ideas as Recipes for Generating New Value and Wealth
Introduction to understanding the value of ideas and innovation
Applying disruptive leadership to innovation challenges
Provoking Organizational Processes and Behaviors with Disruptive Hypotheses
Identifying the assumptions and conventions that influence the way producers and consumers think about your business
How to break through the boundaries of your industry situation
Generating deliberately unreasonable "what if" questions

Building and Leading Disruptive Teams

From command and control to connect and collaborate
The importance of innovation leadership
Building and leading disruptive teams

Pitching Disruptive Ideas to the Organization and External Stakeholders

Establishing the inadequacy of the status quo
Delivering unexpected insights and opportunities to foster curiosity
Building belief in the value an idea delivers