Curriculum
Which innovative ideas are actually worth pursuing? How do you evaluate their true value and impact? How do you identify and overcome challenges to change within established companies?
The Corporate Entrepreneur teaches essential business skills and frameworks, combined with real-world project work to translate ideas into action.
This comprehensive, two-module program spans two months, giving you a unique opportunity to formulate, evaluate, plan, and implement innovation within your organization.
Program Highlights
Corporate Entrepreneurship
In these sessions, you’ll study the most common and substantial barriers to entrepreneurship and innovation within large organizations. These include factors such as internal organization challenges, restrictive decision-making processes, missing competencies (such as the ability to evaluate innovation), institutional and individual attitudes toward risk, organizational politics, and more. You will then identify the set of tools required for overcoming these challenges.
Competitive Strategy for Corporate Entrepreneurs
At the core of a new-venture business model, we have the logic of the business: Why would this particular new venture be able to capture the value created by the innovative business? The answer to this question typically involves some form of a competitive advantage or a barrier to entry.
In this session, we will study the variety of competitive structures and forms of competitive advantages. These will translate to competitive strategies for the newly developing venture, based on the current organization strategy, competitors, and potential new entrants.
Harnessing Stories for Innovation and Growth
Successful innovation creates a new way of being for individuals or businesses. It disrupts industries and drives success. To innovate, you not only need a big idea, you also need people to create it and people to buy into it.
Story fuels innovation. Stories have long held the power to transform the listener; to take them on a journey that changes how they think, feel, or act. In these sessions, you’ll discuss what it means to tell stories in business, what makes an effective story, and when to use them. You will focus on innovation, but also explore other applications.
Financing Innovation
A key step in leading innovation within your enterprise is obtaining the resources needed to fund that innovation. To do so, it is usually necessary to convince others of the financial and strategic merits.
In these sessions, we will see how we can build a financial model that will allow us to make the decision of whether to fund a new investment in a product, project, or business.
How Strategic Innovation Happens
The business world is being transformed worldwide by innovative entrepreneurial firms. Established corporations have so much more going for them than do tiny startups, and yet often they are left behind by the new, innovative strategies of the startups.
In this session, we describe how it is that new, innovative strategies actually come into existence, and why it is that established firms are often disrupted by these innovations. In the process, we will learn about a consistent pattern that seems to occur when innovative strategies emerge.