Innovation@Questrom

COURSE CODE: si480

COURSE CODE: im860

This course provides an action-based learning experience for students interested in understanding how for-profit and non-profit organizations develop innovative products and services that help mitigate grand challenges such as climate change, food security, global health, and poverty, and enable them to grow their business and sustain their competitive advantage over time. Students will work on a live 'social impact' consulting project for a client from the host country, and present their recommendation to the client while in the country. Furthermore, students will visit and interact with various players in the social impact sector (e.g., entrepreneurs, high-level executives, non-profit leaders) to learn about the opportunities and challenges they face. This course is ideal for students interested in social impact, sustainable energy, environmental sustainability, social entrepreneurship, socially responsible investing (SRI), and global health and healthcare.

COURSE CODE: si750

"Competition, Innovation, and Strategy" is an integrative course designed to capitalize on your understanding of Finance, Operations Management, Marketing, and other functional issues. The course draws on a number of academic disciplines, especially economics, organization theory, and sociology, to build a fundamental understanding of how and why some firms achieve and sustain superior performance. We also study why some firms persistently generate returns that are lower than average. The course is analytically focused and requires that you evaluate both the external environment and the internal capabilities of organizations. Corporate diversification and global management are important topics that are also featured.

COURSE CODE: si839

This class will examine how managers and leaders can create the conditions for innovation at the individual, team and organizational levels – and how those conditions differ for startup and mature organizations. Managing innovation includes the generation of ideas; the integration of ideas into new product concepts; and the commercialization of ideas. While core strategy courses address the questions of what innovations to pursue and whether and when those innovations will bring value, this course addresses the question of how managers can create organizations to deliver innovations of value. Thus, the course will focus on the practices and processes that mangers need to put in place to enable organizations to execute on an innovation strategy. In doing so, students will evaluate how to balance the challenges of organizing, managing and leading innovation with the need to produce concrete, routine and expected outcomes within the organization. To be innovative, any new idea must resolve the innovation paradox – introducing enough novelty to appeal to new markets while retaining enough familiarity to tap into existing behaviors. Because design and innovation are frequently inseparable in managing this paradox, the class will assess how design contributes to innovation in product, process and business models across industry sectors. The course will also consider the role that all sources of innovation play – including communities, networks, brokers and other forms of open innovation. Students will be asked to reflect upon innovations that have been critical to their lives, and how these innovations were produced and gained market traction. Final group projects will explore how to “rescue” innovations in trouble with turnaround teams.

COURSE CODE: si858

COURSE CODE: si451

COURSE CODE: si860

This course will give students an understanding of the challenges of undertaking innovation within an existing corporate organization or other large institution such as governments or universities. Established industries are being disrupted by innovative products and services at an increasingly fast pace. Corporate leaders are confronting a dynamic shift from formal stage gate innovation approaches toward more entrepreneurial, iterative, fast-paced innovation processes such as agile development, design thinking, lean startup, rapid prototyping, and the business model canvas. To deliver innovative results, corporations must bridge ideas generated in the labs of tomorrow with current operations. This course aims to accelerate learning on corporate innovation by examining how corporate innovators can stay nimble and enable smart experimentation without risking the competencies that made them great. As the need to innovate becomes a matter of "life and death," how do large organizations successfully innovate? We will examine how techniques and frameworks developed in the startup world are being adapted for the corporate one and how established organizations select from a portfolio of options to foster innovation.

COURSE CODE: is827

To thrive in modern economies, managers, entrepreneurs and investors need a thorough understanding of business platforms. Thousands of firms, from Facebook to Salesforce, now operate as open ecosystems that match buyers and sellers, gain value and market share from network effects, and harness their users to innovate. Drawing on cases from social media, entrepreneurship, enterprise software, mobile services, healthcare, and consumer products, students will analyze and learn to negotiate platform startup, convert existing businesses, and make vital decisions on issues of openness, cannibalization, and competition. Students will interact with execs of major firms such as Cisco and SAP and with startups. They will learn to apply concepts from two sided networks, industrial organization, information asymmetry, pricing, intellectual property, and game theory to real problems. Known worldwide for his work on network business models, Professor Van Alstyne provides students with the tools to leverage key principles into hands-on creation and management of real-world platforms.

COURSE CODE: sr850

This course is designed to: (1) explore the concepts, practices, opportunities, and challenges of social entrepreneurship; (2) provide frameworks and tools that will help students be more effective in this sector; and (3) provide an opportunity for students to create a business plan for a new social enterprise or an income-generating initiative of a nonprofit organization. In the business plan project, student teams will partner with external organizations. Students will identify and analyze opportunities, resources, and risks and apply skills from marketing, accounting, organizational behavior, strategy and other disciplines. Special emphasis will be placed on aspects of business planning and organizational strategy that are particularly challenging or distinctive in the social sector, including mission definition, leadership, organizational structure, raising capital, and measuring results.

COURSE CODE: is474

COURSE CODE: si430