Innovation Process for Industry Project

This module introduces you to the Iterative Innovation Process, which constitutes the fundamental way humans innovate for the advancement of corporations and societies.

The module first focuses on your conceptual understanding by building up the Iterative Innovation Process model step-by-step, and by engaging you with real-world examples and hands-on exercises and assignments. Parallel to you developing an intuition around the multi-disciplinary non-linear thinking that is inherent to the Iterative Innovation Process, the module teaches you methods for structuring complex innovation projects, and for performing high-quality research across the many areas of current and future market applications, technology and science knowledge, and implementation possibilities (such as cost, manufacturing, supply and value chains, laws and regulations, business models, etc.).

While you familiarize yourself with the complexity of the Iterative Innovation Process from the bottom up, you will also immerse yourself in three fundamental innovations of world-wide impact, one of which was created by one of your instructors over the course of two decades, so you can experience the Iterative Innovation Process at work in the context of major societal advancements. This connection to the bigger picture is complemented by examining how productive innovation ecosystems came to be in the past, and what needs to be done to create them again in current times. With the fundamentals of the Iterative Innovation Process and its connection to societies and their advancements in place, the second half of the module then focuses on your up-close and personal experience of the Iterative Innovation Process, complete with multi-dimensional uncertainty in the innovation elements, and with you performing corresponding high-quality research that is useful within the innovation process.

Based on an actual innovation project from the instructors’ experience repertoire, you will be guided though the essential steps of innovation structuring, in-depth innovation research and high-quality innovation reporting, while leaving plenty of uncertainty and complexity for your own decisions and learning approaches. The goal during this Guided Class Project is to provide you with enough uncertainty and real-world multi-disciplinary complexity, yet also with enough guidance, so you can build your individual confidence and skills, and get ready for your individual industrial innovation project during subsequent modules.

A series of lectures will address how to best implement the Iterative Innovation Process in corporations, and link best practices in corporate innovation governance to the experience you make during the Guided Class Project.