MIT Innovation and Leadership Program
Program Description
Small business or large corporation, if your goal is to lead a thriving organization through today’s volatile economic landscape, you must first master the ability to innovate and lead change. The MIT Professional Education Innovation and Leadership Program is a part-time program of strategic resources designed to help you do just that. Here, you can develop the pivotal fusion of skills, knowledge, and perspective crucial to leading business and technological innovation.
The MIT Professional Education Innovation and Leadership Certificate Program teaches you essential skills and effective strategies for working in and managing innovative organizations – and for starting new ones. With change as a constant, the key to success is learning how to keep pace on a global scale, to innovate, and to nurture and develop value-creating ideas across your organization.
This program provides an interactive learning experience on how to galvanize and sustain productive innovation throughout your organizations. Based on the methodology of design thinking, this program prepares today’s leaders to transform the way they think about strategy and execution The program is specifically designed for forward-thinking senior executives who are ready to rethink and revitalize their approach to business and technological challenges.
Learning Outcomes
The MIT innovation and leadership programs will enable you to anticipate market needs and grow your organization's capacity to innovate, so you can improve top-line and bottom-line performance while building sustainable advantage. Specific learning objectives include:
- Gain a better understanding of the tools that every innovative organization needs to succeed.
- Relearn a wider and deeper set of innovation skills, customized to fit both your organization’s needs and your career goals.
- Obtain greater understanding of the best and most current research on innovation and Leadership.
- Enjoy learning from and engaging with some of MIT’s world renowned thought leaders.
- Network with a talented group of peers from diverse background and industries.
Who Should Attend
- Leaders of innovative teams, or teams that wish to be innovative
- Professionals from startups and multinational companies, non-profits and the public sector
- Marketing, sales, finance, and project management teams
- Engineers and project team leads who want to be leaders
- Entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs
Program Curriculum
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Design Thinking: A Practical Approach for Innovation
We live in an age of exponential change in which rapid innovation is disrupting and unseating incumbent products industries, creating new technological frontiers, and challenging nearly everything we think we know about business. Think Uber and the end of the medallion taxi industry. Think Airbnb in more than twice as many countries as Hilton in less than 5 percent of the time. Think Tesla. Think Oculus. But beyond using the “buzzword,” can you really define innovation?
In this course, which is centered on the concept of Design Thinking, your answer to that question will come from actually involving yourself in the activity of innovating. The course will include lectures from faculty and guests, discussions of emerging trends in human behavior and new technologies that are changing our society. Participants will engage with case studies in innovation models and methods and learning expeditions on and beyond the MIT campus. The course will go beyond traditional classroom activities to include group work and a class hands-on brainstorming through which to engage in genuine innovating – and through that, to gain an understanding beyond the buzzword. Participants will emerge as more critical thinkers, knowledgeable about what innovation is (and is not), how it happens through applied design thinking, and how to imagine opportunities for innovative products, services, and experiences.
Active class participation, a willingness to engage with others in a creative process, and a recognition that you might have a lot to learn about innovation are all prerequisites for the class.
Participants will complete this course with a firm, practical understanding of what constitutes genuine innovation and how innovators’ models, methods, and modes of thinking can be utilized to create stronger, more innovative business models, product design, customer experiences and more. With this, they will be able to approach their own teams, departments, products, and business strategies with a critical eye and develop new approaches for innovating.
Participant Benefits:- Learning what constitutes genuine innovation;
- Understanding how to apply design thinking to transform their own organizations.
- Learning the fundamentals of Design Thinking, its methods and models, how it promotes innovation, and how it is different from other methods
- Learning the existing and emerging trends in tech, industry, and our society
- Understanding how the business landscape is being changed by innovators, and the strategies that make it possible to succeed in this new age
- Leading Innovative Team
This course brings MIT’s motto -- mens et manus, or mind to hand – to life. It will challenge you to unleash your innovative strengths and emerge a stronger, more innovative leader, as long as you are prepared to think out of the box.
This course supports the development of highly self-aware leaders with the skills and knowledge required to inspire and nurture creativity and innovation that improves individual, team and organizational performance and competitive positioning.
Participant Benefits:- Understand how leadership enables innovation by building strategies, structures and cultures that support creativity
- Recognize the links between creativity—a new or useful idea—and innovation, the execution and adoption of creative ideas
- Reframe the importance of identifying and defining problems to spur creativity and enable innovation
- Increase self-awareness of personal leadership style and its effects on group creativity and innovation that delivers results
- Strengthen leadership skills to create sustainable, innovative teams and cultures
- Increase effectiveness in building and leading high-performing teams
- Articulate visions that inspire others to unleash motivations central to successful innovation
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Managing Radical and Disruptive Innovation
Ten years ago, traditional players such as Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola dominated the mobile phone industry. Three years ago, the hottest phones were by Samsung and Apple. This year, Samsung is recovering from the Note 7 debacle and seems to have slipped as small competitors from Asia nip at its heels.
Three elements of modern technology are making new ideas appear at such an extraordinary pace: the sheer rate of technical progress, the abundance of tools that are placing advanced technologies within the reach of new entrants, and the extraordinary opportunities created by convergence. Not all innovation needs to progress at this rate; however, there are lessons to be learned from these events and every company should be prepared to leverage opportunities from within or to ward off threats from the outside. The objective of this class is to cover some of the salient features of innovation in the modern world and to lay out the philosophy, tools, procedures, and incentives that an organization can adopt to drive innovation.
Participants Benefits:- Understand how to identify and evaluate new innovative products and businesses.
- Review and understand different ways to create an innovation group and culture and run a targeted innovation session within a company.
- Formulate a corporate plan for invention and new product generation.
- Approach the critical challenges in technology, product, sales, marketing, and financing a new innovative venture.
- Understand the supporting legal and IP requirements and how to set up an intellectual property strategy for the company.
- Incubate, refine, and grow a portfolio of innovative new businesses/products.
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Courses at the MIT Campus
Students enrolled in this program need to attend a 2-3 day module at MIT campus offered by MIT Professional
Education. List of possible courses available include:- Designing Efficient Deep Learning Systems
- Mastering Innovation & Design-Thinking
- Beyond Smart Cities
- MIT Master Trainers Program in Educational Mobile Computing
- People Analytics: Transforming Management with Behavioral Data
