Innovation for Value Creation

From Amazon to Uber there in no question that disruptive innovation is driving the 21^st century economy. And, on the flip-side, that many long-established businesses are falling behind, failing to innovate business models or products that can cut it in our fast-changing digital world.

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Click on Download this Resource for a guide to "Innovation Tournaments"

Innovation tournaments offer a reliable way to create and select exceptional opportunities for innovation. This short guide from Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, professors at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, explain how the process works.

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Innovation is crucial for business sustainability – but it’s difficult. A high percentage of innovations fail and even tech pioneers like Google can come unstuck; as they did when the expensive 2011 launch of Google+, far from rivalling Facebook, barely made an impression. Organizations need a robust template for how to create value through innovation.

Mastering Innovation: From Idea to Value Creation, a new program from Wharton Executive Education, held in San Francisco – the heart of U.S. innovation – offers help. It takes the premise that successful disruptive innovation is not some random manifestation – only achieved by maverick geniuses – but can be the result of a managed process, that can be relied on to generate ideas and turn them into drivers of profits and growth.

Mastering Innovation focuses on three key areas of development that executives need in order to lead successful innovation, whether it be to improve internal business processes, create new business models, or developing new products or services:

Understanding the Competitive Dynamics of Technology

Executives need to see how changes in technology, regulations, and consumer preferences will lead to new opportunities for incumbents and entrants alike. This understanding will enable them to identify future competitive threats as well as to generate internal opportunities for growth.

Learning How to Actively Manage the Process of Innovation

Exceptional innovation opportunities do not just happen, they are made. Innovation leaders need to learn the tools and principles to actively manage the process of creating and selecting exceptional opportunities, and discover how to direct those opportunities to meet the strategic needs of the business. Participant in the Mastering Innovation program will also learn how to manage "innovation tournaments", an organizational process in which many raw opportunities are considered at the outset and only the best survive selection.

Improving Creative Problem-Solving Skills

Executives need both to improve their own creative problem-solving skills and to learn how best to develop these skills in others. Such skills include the ability to walk in the shoes of the customers, to turn unmet customer needs into problem statements for development teams, to create and evaluate a broad set of alternative solution concepts, and to quickly validate new concepts in the market. Ultimately executive need to  developing these skills throughout the organization fostering a culture of innovation to and spur strategic growth.

Wharton Executive Education’s Mastering Innovation program will build strategic leadership competencies, at both the C-suitatione/senior executive level as well as at the team leader level. The program runs from June 11 - 15, 2017.