Columbia Business School is offering a three-day Executive Education program called Marketing and Innovation. The program will teach Systematic Inventive Thinking as well as other key innovation concepts.
The program will be held June 17-19 and November 18-20 in New York. The program is ideal for middle- to upper-level executives who are responsible for strategic innovation and new product development. It is especially good for organizations that wish to send a cross-functional team to work on a specific challenge or project together.
Participants will gain a complete toolkit to take with them in order to tackle marketing challenges more creatively, by generating product-centered as well as market-centered insights. They will also learn the art of persuasion to help them find support for innovation through the organization.
This is a hands-on, three-day program that will help participants generate creative solutions to problems โ solutions that are both novel as well as useful. Each session provides a short conceptual framework followed by an introduction of practical tools and a workshop where the tools can be applied.
Key topics include:
โข Leveraging various outside constituencies in innovation (e.g., customers, lead users).
โข Finding big opportunities and ideas
โข Generating Product, Market, and Customer Insights
โข Screening Ideas and Rapid Experimentation
โข Building a Culture of Innovation
Participants from last yearโs program had this to say:
โInnovation can be learned. So many people are intimidated by the concept of innovation because they think you have to be this incredibly genius-type person. But weโve learned all sorts of tools that everybody can use. As long as you think systematically and follow a process, you can come up with good results. This was gratifying to me: that I, too, can be innovative and that I can really be good at it.โ
โ Kathy Farley, Dow Jones and Company
โMarketing and Innovation was a great way to learn new techniques for innovative thinking in the business environment. I canโt wait to apply these concepts in my company.โ
โ Molly Poppie, The Nielsen Company
โMarketing and Innovation was completely eye opening. The biggest value was discovering that you can learn creativity and understanding that, as a good manager, you have to carve out time during your week [for innovation] and inspire your team. Allowing people to share ideas and that youโre trusting them: thatโs something Iโve learned through this course.โ
โ Bettina Alonso, Oceana
โFrom my perspective, Iโd describe the program as the future. A lot of the concepts Iโve learned are going to drive forward my business, our ideas and where we go.โ
โ Ben Healy, Clayton Utz