The Program
The program is an interdisciplinary education established by uniting academic disciplines necessary to analyze and assess customer needs and customer experiences. This multi-disciplinary orientation would rely on methods and techniques from disciplines in engineering, business, design and social sciences.
The program has been designed and structured to be a self-driven learning experience. Students who in the future, will initiate, lead and sustain a culture of innovation in their organization are expected to exhibit the same qualities for their learning and self-development process.
The program features a cutting edge cluster structure which mirrors how business works across functional areas. In our unique approach the relationships between subject matter is leveraged. Each cluster builds upon the work of previous sessions and sets the stage for the next cluster of courses. Modules are taught through seminars, workshops and project work.
A range of interactive teaching methods is used in the program delivery. With strong emphasis on reflective learning based on collaborative problem solving, traditional lectures are complimented with group discussions, workshops, fieldwork and explorations.
Emphasis will be to create an exciting and charged environment, where cutting edge solutions are created. A mix of youthful vibrancy with experience and maturity, global viewpoints with local realities, emerging technology with traditional wisdom, and existing knowledge with revolutionary thinking will lead to an exciting journey through the program.
The program has been developed with industry focus. The program provides students with subjects and modules related to innovation and strategy. Besides this a solid foundation in the management disciplines is also imparted through courses like – Organizational Behavior & Principles & Practices of Management, Statistical & Quantitative Analysis, Accounting for Managers, Managerial Economics, Legal Aspects Of Business, Financial Management, Human Resource Management, Production & Operations Management, Marketing Management, Research Methodology and Operations Research, Consumer Behaviour, Marketing Research and Quality Management.
The course in Basics of Innovation introduces students to the broad field of economics of knowledge and innovation, starting with a critical assessment of the term ‘knowledge-based society’ and the definition of key terms, such as knowledge and information, invention and innovation, learning etc. As the course progresses it will focus on knowledge and innovation in economic and social science theory, starting with Schumpeter, turning to traditional neoclassical and new growth theory, showing the different perspectives of evolutionary theory and systemic approaches of the social sciences. The course will conclude with the issue of science, technology and innovation policy including practical examples. In the course we focus on classical innovation theory and focus on the process of innovation as the main phenomenon for creation of economic growth. The process of innovation is considered at different levels of abstraction: is it possible for a society, an industry, a company or even a person to deliberately develop their skills and capacity for innovation and thus generate a competitive advantage.
In the course, Design as Competitive Strategy, students will learn how design thinking is applied to a variety of business problems. They will develop design-thinking skills through a series of short exercises. They will have the opportunity to work with a team on a project to comprehensively apply design thinking to a business problem and create a solution in the form of a product, service, and customer experience or business model. Students will develop a deep understanding of the role of design as a competitive weapon, a set of design thinking skills and methods and a tangible result from their team design project. They will be prepared to address business challenges in a creative way and will possess unique skills that will be increasingly valuable in a competitive world.
Management today is utilizing more and more of creative skills rather than analytical skills. The course Creative Problem Solving is designed to provide an understanding of the creative process in a systemic framework. On completion of this course the students will be able to: grasp the creative process and appreciate the use of divergent thinking for open-ended problems. They will be able to apply creative problem solving techniques for idea generation and structuring in a systemic manner. They will be able to utilize creativity techniques in decisions making.
The course in User Research and Qualitative Methods will teach students anthropological fieldwork methods. Students will learn through reading and discussion and by conducting a semester-long fieldwork projects. They will become familiar with both traditional long-term fieldwork approaches and rapid assessment techniques used in applied anthropology.
The course in Strategic Management deals with issues of strategy and the quest for competitive advantage, strategic intent, strategy formulation, strategic analysis, analyzing a company’s external environment, corporate portfolio analysis, generic competitive strategies, tailoring strategy to fit a specific industry, new business models, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation.
The Leadership Development course is a journey of personal exploration, understanding and development with the explicit goal of making demonstrable progress towards becoming a more effective leader. To achieve this goal, the course offers an extensive examination of leadership in organizations and provides students with a set of experiences that are designed to enhance their self-awareness and capacity for effective leadership.
The course Opportunity Recognition, Scenarios and Forecasting will help students to assess the viability of new business concepts. Using theory from the social sciences and building on marketing concepts, the course provides tools for understanding and evaluating markets and industries. Viability is a function of market demand—what the new venture should offer, and differential advantage—and how the venture will perform in a competitive industry. Students will explore in detail the nature of concepts and consider them in terms of their value to users and adaptability by providers. The course is designed to provide students with one skill set that will help them create new business concepts and help the students assess a concept’s viability before investing significant amounts of time and money.
Innovation Management examines key managerial features of modern innovation. Identifies diverse ways firms can access innovative capabilities. The managerial interplay between technology and management leading to innovation in the marketplace is a major focus of discussion and work.
In the course Creating Uncontested Market Space students will learn to value innovate using the Blue Ocean Strategy framework. They will learn logic and tools of Value Innovation, reconstruct the boundaries of business, deliver exceptional value to customers and apply the value innovation process thereby creating an uncontested market space.
Innovation Toolkit is a framework for using all the knowledge, information and wisdom that the students have acquired through the course in an integrated framework from opportunity recognition to realizing the ideas. The purpose of the Innovation Tool Kit is to give you an actionable approach to Innovating on purpose. The innovation toolkit is based on the work of Prof. Vijay Kumar.
In the course Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid students explore effective business strategies for BoP markets. To explore these issues, this course integrates concepts of strategy, international business, nonprofit management, and poverty alleviation to stimulate the leadership skills and competitive imagination needed to design BoP ventures. Students learn to identify the opportunities associated with a new perspective on serving BoP markets; and develop the strategies, business models and partnerships required to productively explore those opportunities.
The Service Innovation course will look into designing for services in ways that stimulate senses, connect deeply with people’s lifestyles, emphasize the broader social and cultural context of people’s actions and provide support through networked service ecology. By the end of the course students will have: explored definitions, categorizations and attributes of quality service experiences, participated in a service design process, created models that illustrate the ecologies of participants, processes and touch points of the experience, produced rough service experience prototypes and discussed the challenges of implementing a new or improved service.
The objective of Business Model Innovation in New Ventures course is to provide students with the skills and knowledge to rapidly assess and shape business models to their advantage in constructing enterprises of scale. The course will examine the elements of business models; explore how they differ across industries and phases of a firm’s growth – from high-tech to social ventures and from the earliest start-up phases through realization of significant value. Students will also be able to explore their own industry focus.
The New Product Development course provides an in-depth understanding of new product development – including best practices, new product strategy; consumer/customer need identification, idea generation, concept development, prototype design, go-to-market strategy, cross functional teaming, metrics and culture. Student will create a new-to-the-world product or service and build a business case to support it.
The co-creation course will introduce and cover in detail the concepts of co-creation and crowd sourcing; dealing with how businesses can harness the power of consumers and the wider external community outside of the business to engage with them in design, development, testing and research of new concepts and technologies to turn them into winning products and services. This course will teach industry proven tools and methods on how to place your customer and consumers at the center of the innovation process.