Driving Strategic Innovation: Achieving High Performance Throughout the Value Chain

How do the most successful innovators generate more than their fair share of smart ideas? How do they unleash the creative talent of their people? How do they move ideas through their organizations and supply chains that are not only creative but fast to market? The answers to these key questions form the core of this program for business leaders and entrepreneurs who are determined to position their companies for future growth.

Offered jointly with IMD, this course combines marketing, product development, technology assessment, value-chain design, project execution, and talent management in an end-to-end roadmap for achieving breakthrough performance. Drawing on a dynamic and integrative value chain framework created at MIT, participants learn how to build organizational relationships that facilitate knowledge transfer, both within the firm and across the value chain. Business leaders will explore how to successfully manage strategic innovation from concept to commercialization.

Participants will leave this program armed with the knowledge of how to influence corporate culture, alter the way their organization responds to the challenge of strategic innovation, and strengthen relationships with partners along the value chain.

This intensive learning experience will deliver long-term value, helping business leaders to:

• Meet technology challenges, from R&D to manufacturing, and project management to engineering
• Link technology decisions with business strategy
• Integrate product development, process developments, and value-chain strategy
• Develop organization and supply-chain strategies to position the company for future growth
• Leverage learning and innovation collaboration with customers, lead users, and suppliers, maximizing the value of research
• Understand how technologies and markets evolve and how they are linked
• Outperform the competition by generating breakthrough ideas
• Cope with shorter product life cycles, while delivering greater customer satisfaction
• Optimize sourcing and “make-buy” decisions
• Integrate supply chain design with concurrent engineering
• Engage talent within the organization and across the value chain

Throughout this course, you will participate in wide-ranging and challenging discussions, intensive group projects, and live case studies, with ample opportunities for interaction with faculty and peers. Past participants form a network of innovative thinkers who continue to exchange ideas long after the course ends.

Program themes:

• Incremental and discontinuous strategic innovation are not opposites, they are partners
• We love our customers, but we are always out of equilibrium with them
• We might serve our customers better by talking with people who are not our customers, and never will be
• Good ideas do not just rely on experts, they require non-experts as well
• Innovation thrives when ambiguity is both reduced and enlarged
• Creating value is not the same as capturing value
• Wide-ranging creativity requires discipline
• Bottom-up entrepreneurial innovation thrives under strong, self-confident, top-down leaders

This course is designed for senior executives and entrepreneurs who have significant input into the technology and innovation strategy of their organizations. Participants should play a key role within their organizations where they have the ability and perspective to look up and down the value chain to appraise strategic technology options wherever they arise.

Business leaders who will take away the greatest value from this program include:

• CTOs
• R&D directors
• Other senior executives, and entrepreneurs who are responsible for technology, R&D, and supply chain strategy
• CEOs
• COOs
• CIOs
• Senior executives in charge of strategic innovation or new business development
• Teams charged with planning and implementing innovation or value chain strategy