Innovation is not a discrete event but an ongoing organizational capability — and managing it well is among the most difficult leadership challenges because it requires simultaneously maintaining operational excellence (which favors standardization, reliability, and efficiency) and creative innovation (which favors experimentation, variability, and tolerance of failure). DB8730 develops the management frameworks, design tools, and organizational approaches that enable organizations to build and sustain genuine innovation capability rather than cycling through innovation initiatives that produce activity without durable competitive advantage.
Organizational creativity: individual, team, and systems levels
Multi-level framework for understanding and managing organizational creativity
- Individual creativity: DB8730 examines the psychological research on individual creative performance — the individual-level foundation of organizational creativity. Teresa Amabile's (1988, 1996) componential model of creativity proposes that individual creative performance is determined by three components: domain-relevant skills (knowledge and technical skills in the relevant field — creativity requires knowing enough to recognize what is novel); creativity-relevant processes (cognitive styles and work approaches that facilitate creative thinking — including tolerance of ambiguity, risk-taking, the ability to break from established algorithms, and wide categorical thinking); and intrinsic task motivation (genuine interest in and enjoyment of the work itself — the most reliable predictor of creative output, and the factor most readily influenced by organizational context). The course examines what managers can do to support individual creativity: providing autonomy in how work is accomplished (not necessarily in what is accomplished); matching individuals to tasks that align with their existing skills and interests; ensuring adequate resources (especially time) for creative exploration; and managing evaluation and feedback in ways that inform without threatening intrinsic motivation
- Team creativity and innovation: The course examines team-level creativity — the research on what team characteristics, processes, and leadership behaviors predict team-level innovation output. Team composition effects on creativity: diverse teams (in domain expertise, functional background, cognitive style, and demographic characteristics) tend to generate more diverse ideas, but managing diversity productively requires psychological safety and active facilitation of the diversity benefits. Team processes that facilitate creativity: building on each other's ideas (elaboration of diverse contributions) rather than advocating for one's own; engaging in constructive conflict (task conflict focused on ideas) while minimizing relationship conflict; maintaining what Edmondson (1999) calls "team psychological safety" — the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, including sharing unconventional ideas. The course also examines structured creativity techniques (nominal group technique, brainwriting, SCAMPER, random word association) that research shows can increase the quality and quantity of ideas generated in team settings
Business model innovation and corporate renewal
DB8730 examines business model innovation as a distinct innovation domain — one that often creates greater and more durable competitive advantage than product or process innovation alone. Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur's Business Model Canvas (2010) provides the most widely adopted framework for business model analysis and design: the nine building blocks (customer segments, value propositions, channels, customer relationships, revenue streams, key resources, key activities, key partnerships, and cost structure) provide a holistic description of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. The course examines how to use the canvas both analytically (diagnosing the current business model and its vulnerabilities) and generatively (designing alternative business models that could create competitive advantage). Rita McGrath's transient competitive advantage framework (2013) challenges the strategic management field's assumption that sustainable competitive advantage is the goal — in high-velocity markets, competitive advantage is increasingly transient, and the organizational capability to continuously create, exploit, and abandon advantages as they erode is more important than defending any specific advantage. This shifts innovation strategy from protecting the core to continuously renewing the portfolio of competitive advantages, which requires fundamentally different organizational routines, metrics, and leadership behaviors than traditional competitive strategy suggests.
Design thinking and human-centered innovation
DB8730 develops design thinking as an innovation methodology — the IDEO/Stanford d.school approach to creative problem-solving that has been adopted across industries as a way to develop deeply customer-centered solutions. The design thinking process (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test — with iteration loops at each stage) provides a structured approach to the creative challenge of developing solutions that create genuine customer value. The course examines the five stages in depth: empathize (developing deep understanding of user needs, experiences, and contexts through observation, interview, and immersive research — not asking customers what they want, but observing what they actually do and understanding why); define (synthesizing empathy research into a clear problem statement that frames the creative challenge productively); ideate (generating a wide range of possible solutions before converging on the most promising); prototype (creating rough, quick representations of solutions that can be tested with users — not finished products, but learning objects); and test (gathering user feedback on prototypes to inform further iteration). The course examines both when design thinking is most powerful (ambiguous, human-centered problems where customer insight is the primary constraint on innovation quality) and where it is less suited (problems with known solutions, technical optimization problems, or contexts where user research is inaccessible).
Ecosystem leverage and innovative workspace design
DB8730 examines two organizational approaches to innovation that go beyond the boundaries of the individual firm. Ecosystem leverage — the strategic use of external innovation networks, partnerships, and communities to access innovation capability that the firm cannot develop internally — includes open innovation partnerships (formal or informal relationships with universities, startups, suppliers, and even competitors that expand the firm's access to novel ideas and technologies); corporate venturing (investing in or acquiring startups that explore innovation spaces adjacent to the core business); and innovation platforms (creating external developer ecosystems that generate innovations on top of the firm's platform infrastructure — Apple's App Store, Salesforce's AppExchange). Innovative workspace design examines the physical and virtual environment research on creativity-supporting workspace: studies consistently show that workspace design influences the quantity and quality of creative interaction — proximity to colleagues with different expertise increases serendipitous knowledge combination; multipurpose spaces that support both focused individual work and high-bandwidth collaboration accommodate the alternating solitude and sociality that creative work requires; and access to making and prototyping tools (makerspace facilities, model-building materials, rapid prototyping equipment) reduces the barrier to translating ideas into testable artifacts. The course also examines remote and hybrid workspace design for innovation — a practically urgent topic given the widespread adoption of hybrid work models — examining the research on how virtual collaboration tools can and cannot replicate the serendipitous creative interaction of co-located innovation work.
DB8730 assignments include innovation ecosystem analyses, business model canvases, design thinking projects, and workspace innovation assessments
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Innovation analyses, business model canvases, design thinking projects, ecosystem assessments.
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Frequently asked questions
DB8730 examines March's (1991) exploration-exploitation framework — one of the most foundational concepts in organizational learning and innovation theory — and the organizational approaches to managing the tension between them. Exploitation involves refining and extending existing competencies, products, and processes — the activities that generate current financial returns and that most organizational routines (resource allocation, performance measurement, incentive systems, career development) are optimized to support. Exploration involves experimenting with new alternatives — pursuing innovations that are uncertain, longer-term, and potentially cannibalistic of current capabilities. The tension between exploration and exploitation is fundamental: organizations that optimize purely for exploitation gradually innovate less and become less competitive as the competitive environment changes; organizations that optimize purely for exploration never develop the focused execution needed to generate returns from their innovations. The research-supported approaches to managing this tension: ambidextrous organization design (Duncan, 1976; Tushman & O'Reilly, 1996) involves creating separate organizational units with different structures, incentives, and cultures for exploitation (efficiency-oriented, process-standardized) and exploration (innovation-oriented, experiment-tolerant), with senior leadership coordinating between them. Contextual ambidexterity (Gibson & Birkinshaw, 2004) builds the organizational context that enables individuals throughout the organization to judge when to exploit and when to explore, rather than structurally separating these activities. Innovation portfolio management (applying portfolio thinking to innovation investment) deliberately allocates investment across near-term incremental innovation, medium-term adjacent innovation, and long-term transformational innovation in ratios (the "70-20-10" rule) that reflect the organization's innovation ambition and competitive environment. DB8730 develops the frameworks to analyze which approach is most appropriate for specific organizational contexts rather than prescribing a universal solution.