Innovator's DNA: Mastering Five Skills for Innovative Impact

Innovation isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a skill set. In an era of rapid AI-driven transformation, how do leaders continuously generate groundbreaking ideas and maintain their human edge? According to research by Hal Gregersen, co-author of The Innovator’s DNA, the world's top innovators depend on five key discovery skills to succeed: questioning to challenge assumptions, observing to recognize emerging patterns, networking to surface unexpected insights, experimenting to refine big ideas, and associating to combine unrelated concepts into disruptive business models.

Far from making these skills obsolete, AI is amplifying their power. Today's disruptive innovators aren't just using AI as a tool, they are co-creating with it, balancing human ingenuity with AI-driven insight. By embedding AI into the innovation process, this course helps leaders retain their agency, sharpen their discovery skills, and navigate change with confidence. Participants will learn not only how to foster curiosity and creativity but also how to harness AI in ways that enhance rather than replace human intuition.

This course was formerly known as Innovator's DNA: Mastering Five Skills for Innovative Disruption.

This highly interactive program will help participants:

• Gain deeper insight into their own discovery and execution skill balance, and develop strategies to leverage both for greater leadership impact
• Build questioning, observing, networking, experimenting, and associational thinking capabilities to surface new ideas and deliver value-creating solutions
• Apply the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework, and use AI-powered insight, to decode customer needs more effectively
• Evolve existing corporate culture to foster more 10% improvements and 10x transformations through the effective combination of innovation and execution skills.
• Apply discovery skills, and enhance them with AI tools, to make measurable progress on concrete individual challenges
• Shape creative cultures that create and sustain high innovation premiums for teams and organizations

Upon successful completion of your course, you will earn a certificate of completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management. This course may also count toward MIT Sloan Executive Certificate requirements.

Building on more than a decade of research and 20,000+ leadership assessments, this course provides a deep dive into the habits of world-class innovators in the world’s most innovative companies. Participants will practice:

• Catalytic questioning—honing the power of inquiry to surface breakthrough ideas, including how to leverage AI to expand the scope of questioning.
• Deep observation—seeing more deeply and strengthening pattern recognition, with AI-assisted insight, to uncover unseen opportunities. 
• Diverse networking—connecting with unconventional thinkers to challenge assumptions and leveraging AI-driven tools to expand potential idea sources.
• Rapid experimentation— testing new ideas quickly and incorporating AI-enhanced prototyping to accelerate learning cycles.
• Associational thinking—exploring how AI can help connect seemingly unrelated concepts to deliver disruptive business ideas and strategies.
• Throughout this application-driven course, participants will work on a real-time innovation challenge, applying these skills, in collaboration with AI-powered tools, while sustaining human-first creativity at the center of the process.

To put these innovation skills, frameworks, and strategies into practice, participants will identify an individual challenge for which they seek a solution and commit to making creative progress on that challenge throughout the course. They will also rely on the five discovery skills to help uncover the essential “jobs-to-be-done” from a customer’s perspective – uncovering customer needs that often go unnoticed. 

Participants will also engage in a personal diagnostic assessment to better understand their own innovation and execution-focused leadership skills in comparison to 20,000+ professionals and leaders around the world.