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Vanderbilt University

Strategic Innovation Toolkit for Managers

Vanderbilt University via Coursera

This course may be unavailable.

Overview

The Business Essentials for Managers Specialization will close for enrollment on 10/8/2019. If you are interested in earning a Specialization Certificate, please upgrade or apply for Financial Aid in each course of the specialization by 10/7/2019, if you have not already done so. After 10/8/2019 students will no longer have access to courses they have not paid for.
In order to earn a Specialization Certificate, you will need to complete all graded assignments, including peer reviews, by 10/8/2020. After that point, no new assignment submissions will be accepted for Certificate credit.

If you are a Coursera for Business learner, you can continue to use your sponsored credit. In order to earn a Course Certificate, you will need to complete all graded assignments, including peer reviews, by 4/5/2020. After that point, no new assignment submissions will be accepted for Certificate credit.



Does your business culture nurture innovation, or stifle it? Are you looking for ways to build your business creatively but find daunting constraints at every turn? This course is designed to help you understand the forces that limit innovation, identify those barriers in your own business culture, and break free of them to realize the full value of your imagination.

You’ll learn new skills and strategies that you can immediately apply to drive innovation in your group or organization, and you’ll build an understanding of the six most common constraints on innovation in both individual and group settings—that is, the six ways that creative thinking is often sabotaged before it can produce results. You’ll also learn to recognize stakeholders who are actively invested in stopping your ideas in their tracks. Finally, you’ll examine societal and technical constraints that you’ll need to overcome to foster a forward-thinking culture.

Through case studies and interactive exercises, you’ll learn how to generate and implement great ideas in your organization, build your organization’s capacity for innovation, create an innovative culture, lead innovation projects and teams, recognize big issues lurking on the horizon before they become constraints, drive adoption of great ideas, develop and manage an innovation portfolio, and innovate to stay relevant and competitive in a fast-changing landscape.

Syllabus

Introduction: Why Everyone Wants Innovation But No One Wants to Change

Individual Constraints: Why Most of Us Are More Creative Than We Think

Group Constraints

Organizational Constraints

Industry Constraints: If It's Such a Great Idea, Why Isn't Our Competitor Doing It?

Societal Constraints: Why My Innovation Means You Have to Change

Technological Constraints: How to Take a Really Hard Problem and Make It Completely Impossible

When Failure Is Not an Option: Leading an Innovative Strategy

Taught by

David A. Owens, PhD, PE

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