Executive Education

Description
Where do you get the breakthrough innovative ideas you need to create successful competitive products for the future?

At the MIT Sloan School of Management, where we have long been recognized as a worldwide leader in the field of innovation, our two-day executive program on Building, Leading, and Sustaining the Innovative Organization draws on powerful MIT Sloan research to offer a set of strategies for growing your company in the face of changing markets, technologies, and consumer demand.

In this unique session on identifying and bringing successful ideas to market, you'll learn about the steps you need to take as to drive strategic innovation in the organization, including how to:

• Get the right mix of people and skills you'll need to generate innovative ideas in a more timely manner
• Develop the processes required to support these people
• Build cultures that encourage innovative behaviors
• Decide which ideas are the right ideas in which to invest, and which are the new business opportunities you ought to pursue

Our faculty of senior experts and MIT researchers also will help you to understand:

• Tactics for dealing with the internal politics and resistance to change that can threaten innovation initiatives and early-stage developments
• Techniques you can use to build innovation streams
• Processes for collecting competitive intelligence, forecasting technology change and gathering information on user needs
• Methods for identifying better innovations more quickly, including the lead-user method for discovering breakthrough products, services and strategies, and toolkits for user innovation that enable users to design their own mass-customized products and services.

The Participants
Building, Leading, and Sustaining the Innovative Organization has been developed for senior corporate and technical executives, including Executive Vice Presidents, Vice Presidents of Marketing, New Product Development, Research and Development, Human Resources, and New Business Development, Chief Information Officers, Chief Technologists, Corporate Strategists, Corporate Planners, and other executives with leadership responsibility for their organization.

Faculty
Eric A. von Hippel, Professor, Management of Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation. For example, he finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, successful innovations are often first developed and tested by the users themselves, "lead users", rather than by the firms that are first to bring those innovations to market.

Ralph Katz, Principal Research Associate. For more than 35 years, Professor Katz has been carrying out extensive management research, education and consulting on technology-based innovation with a particular interest in the management and motivation of technical professionals and high performing groups and project teams.

Jay Paap, President of Paap Associates, Inc. He has been active in the management of technology for 30 years, and has consulted with industrial and governmental organizations for over 25 years. He has been a frequent speaker on the management of innovation, appearing throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan. Dr. Paap received his PhD from MIT's Sloan School of Management and has held faculty positions at MIT Sloan and Indiana University.