Strategic Innovation: Building and Sustaining Innovative Organizations

You will become familiar with the course, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation will also help you obtain the technical skills required for the course. Module 1 provides a lifecycle perspective of the link between innovation and strategy. We will examine where innovations come from, how they change over time, and how these changes influence firms’ incentives to invest in different types of technologies. We will also discuss customer adoption and how this shapes firms’ decisions of whether and when to enter new markets. We will also learn about prospect theory and how it relates to developing successful winning innovations.

This module focuses on how innovating entrants can disrupt industry leaders. We will learn the concepts of sustaining and disruptive innovation and consider frameworks for how entrants can leverage disruptive innovations to overcome incumbents’ competitive advantage. We will also consider how incumbents can and should respond to disruptive innovations.

This module examines innovation and firm boundaries. We will consider when firms should invest in developing innovations internally versus when they should pursue an “open” strategy by seeking new ideas and technologies outside the firm. In addition, we will learn about different mechanisms that enable firms to capture value from innovations, including the importance of patents and specialized assets and capabilities in providing a competitive advantage. Finally, we will consider when innovators should forward integrate to compete with other firms in product markets and when they should license their innovations to other firms in technology markets.