Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Essentials Program

Innovative Tools to Transform Entrepreneurship Digitally

In today’s complex and disruptive world, innovation management is key to staying relevant to customers, keeping ahead of the competition, and taking advantage of emerging digital technologies. The Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Essentials Program will equip you with insights, skills, and tools to act as a frontrunner in innovation and corporate entrepreneurship within your organization. Renowned WHU faculty members and experienced practitioners, with extensive international experience, will share with you the latest research results, practical tools, strategic approaches, and agile methods for fostering an innovative mindset. The program is designed to engage all aspects of innovation and entrepreneurship through guest lectures, group work, case studies, and a Serious Lego Play Session. Special attention will be paid to generative AI and the practical applications of ChatGPT. You will learn how to utilize it effectively in your business development strategies through real-life examples.

You will be awarded with a WHU Executive Education Certificate after successfully completing the program.

Corporate Transformation Innovation Management Essentials Strategy

Suitable for participants with at least:

5YearsWork

Program Faculty

Competitive disruption, shrinking product life cycles, and constantly changing customer needs and expectations: these are some of the serious challenges most organizations face today. To survive – let alone thrive – you need to accelerate and sustain innovation by seizing the opportunities emerging from innovative technological advances and new business models, data, and analytics.

This transformation management program is targeted at young professionals, executives, and middle managers from various industry backgrounds who want to apply corporate entrepreneurship and innovation principles to their own enterprises. This in-depth program consists of a range of different teaching formats that help you in engaging with all aspects of innovation management. The learning experience encompasses lectures, group work, case studies, and a Serious Lego Play Session.

Learn how to utilize generative AI and ChatGPT effectively in your business development strategies

One main focus of the program will be generative AI and the practical applications of ChatGPT. Professor Dries Faems, Chair of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Technological Transformation will guide you through a series of hands-on examples, providing you with the tools and prompts necessary to leverage ChatGPT's potential to the fullest. Professor Faems will demonstrate with real-life examples:

How to leverage ChatGPT to engage in customer-centric exploration of new business model opportunities
How to use ChatGPT based agents for reliable competitor analyses
How to use Generative AI tools such as Copilot to facilitate the analysis of customer feedback and customer reviews
How to increase efficiency of social media communication with generative ai tools such as ChatGPT and Midjouney

You will also have the chance to reach out to your program peers and exchange relevant experiences and generate more practical ideas. WHU’s renowned faculty members, as well as experienced practitioners, will share their latest research results and practical tools during the program, giving you cutting-edge science and management insights on entrepreneurship and innovation.

We are happy to announce the following guest speakers:

Gerrit McGowan, serial entrepreneur and host of the Most Awesome Founder Podcast
Ronja Stoffregen, Head of Global Startup Management - DB Schenker
Julian Fieres, Head of Transformation, Strategy & Sustainability - ZF Electrified Powertrain Technology

This innovation training will help you learn how to leverage your organizational talent and resources to foster innovation within your own enterprise. The program explores state-of-the-art innovation practices for a stronger (digital) customer experience, a successful ecosystem of partnerships with start-ups, and strategic relationships with users and communities. To understand the human side of innovation, you will take a deep dive into the culture and leadership styles of innovation. You will also be introduced to the novel structures used by companies to stimulate innovation (e.g. ambidextrous organization, Spotify-model, micro-structures).

Innovation and transformation management is all about dynamics and speed: learn to drive innovation in the market with start-up velocity and gain the necessary innovative tools and frameworks to boost your business competitiveness and power your future growth!

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)

Young professionals, executives and middle managers wanting to

grasp the importance and applicability of innovation & entrepreneurship in their own organization
cultivate an innovation culture throughout their company
foster and drive innovation
ignite creative talent
recognize, attain and exploit smart ideas from outside your business
better understand and serve customer needs
improve their decision-making process
accelerate the time from idea to market
initiate and lead innovation-driven organizational transformation
transform your business unit/function

This program is suitable for companies of all sectors and sizes, including small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs. The minimum number of participants for the program is 12.

This program runs for 3 days at WHU Campus Düsseldorf, Germany.

Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Essentials

Jun 16, 2025 - Jun 18, 2025, Düsseldorf

Get the full General Management Experience – Special offer

This Program is part of the Management Essentials Program, a package that provides participants, who are transitioning into a leadership position, or have done so recently, with the fundamental skills of General Management. You can choose 3 out of 4 of the following programs: Leadership Essentials, Strategy Essentials, Financial Literacy, and Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Essentials.

In combination with an additional personality profile, the 3 programs can be scheduled flexibly to make them best fit your professional and personal schedule.

Upon completion of the program, participants receive WHU’s “Certificate of Excellence in General Management”. Furthermore, you can choose to gain 6 ECTS credits.

Do you want to know more about the content of this program? Check out this episode of the WHU Best and Most Awesome Founder Podcast in which Prof. Dr. Dries Faems, coordinator of the Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Essentials Program, discusses the core challenges of innovation management and corporate entrepreneurship with leading management thinker and Stanford Professor Steve Blank.

FAQ

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.

Other customers signed up for