Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Essentials Program

• Recognize why most companies struggle with managing innovation, why most innovations fail and how breakthrough innovations really happen in leading companies
• Understand how to make a compelling case for innovation and lead the charge for innovation processes in your organization
• Develop the skills to unleash your creativity, inspire passion for strategic innovation management and build a vibrant culture
• Gain a deep understanding of the strategic implications of innovation
• Gather insights into design thinking, rapid prototyping, agile implementation, and other start-up like approaches
• Learn how to deal with creative destruction and disruption to establish an entrepreneurship spirit within your company
• Realize how companies can build successful innovation ecosystems with external stakeholders (start-ups, universities and even competitors)

Innovation describes the process of transforming ideas into products and services that can be launched onto the market. Innovations in companies rarely occur by chance but result from purposefully deployed resources, skills, and processes. Innovation management has the task of planning, steering, and controlling these to overcome internal and external barriers to innovation. In general terms, innovation management should create conditions to increase the probability that an idea is indeed successfully translated into products and services, which can generate additional economic or social value.

In a highly dynamic, disruptive and uncertain environment, innovation capabilities are a fundamental prerequisite to prosper and survive in the long term. As a cross-sectional responsibility, innovation management is of great importance when it comes to shaping the companies’ profitability. In particular, innovation management has a leading role in identifying and developing new growth opportunities that can become the core cash cows for the focal company in the future.

Innovation management is typically responsible for and monitors the process of an idea from its generation, through various selection and evaluation stages, to innovation implementation, market launch, and, if necessary, final performance analysis. The goal is to develop new products, services, or business models that can be successfully commercialized. These processes are often highly complex and characterized by many technical, socio-political, and economic factors. Companies can rely on different process models to manage the innovation process. When the company is working on rather incremental innovations, where the main objective is to improve existing products or services, companies can implement sequential innovation process models such as the notable Stage-Gate-Process model. When the company aims for radical innovation, implying the generation of products or services that are new to the firm or even new to the world, more iterative process models will be necessary, such as the scrum methodology. Given the increasing complexity of innovation activities, firms often need to rely on external partners such as universities, customers or even competitors to bring together the necessary resources and skills to successfully accomplish innovation trajectories. Companies have therefore increasingly embraced open innovation process models where external companies are integrated into the innovation process.

Innovation management tools are structures and methods that companies can use to optimize their innovation management. At the organizational level, companies have recently introduced a wide variety of novel structures (i.e. incubators, innovation labs, accelerators, venture studios) to stimulate their internal innovation activities. At the project level, companies increasingly embrace an alternative toolset to foster creativity within organizations and allow employees to engage in entrepreneurial activities. This alternative toolset encompasses concepts such as agility, ideation and the lean startup-approach.