Here’s an excerpt from an article by Melissa Korn for the Wall Street Journal in which she explains how and why innovation education is getting innovative at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. Its innovation program looks at how ideas are formed. To read the complete article, check out a video, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Photo: Laura DeCapua
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Business schools that teach innovation to executives are faced with the same kind of challenges their clients face—a crowded market and fast-paced technological change. So just as they counsel their students to do, they are revamping their methods.
In particular, schools are trying to move away from staid lectures and lessons about thinking outside the box. “Innovation has to be learned by doing,” says Luke Williams, head of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Any professor whose course about innovation is based on case studies “is just fooling themselves,” Mr. Williams says.
Challenging Thinking
Next month, Mr. Williams will lead a team of executives through his two-day, $2,800 “Disruptive Leadership: Fostering a Culture of Game-Changing Innovation,” which offers step-by-step plans for innovation at the individual, team and organizational levels.
Executives in the class will identify and challenge conceptual frameworks about products and pricing that have restricted their creativity and have kept them thinking about business the same way for years.
For example, if a cellphone doesn’t work, a traditional assumption would be that its battery needs to be recharged. Mr. Williams wants his students to reject traditional assumptions and think in terms of “unreasonable provocation”—thoughts that will get creative juices flowing. A better question, he says, could be why a cellphone needs a battery at all.
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To read the complete article, please click here.
Melissa Korn is a reporter who writes about higher education for The Wall Street Journal, with a special focus on business schools. Her coverage areas include undergraduate and graduate admissions and financial aid, academics and administrative news at schools worldwide. She can be reached at melissa.korn@wsj.com.