Why do established companies need to innovate? Does it make more sense to incubate internally or create a new external venture? Should you buy or build?

Innovation is never easy, especially in established organizations. Coming up with the right ideas is the first step. Figuring out how to sell them, get support, and implement takes a unique set of innovation skills and innovative leadership.

The organizational innovation curriculum in the Driving Innovation program is carefully designed for senior-level leaders in large companies to help you design, generate, and lead successful innovation. It encompasses design fundamentals, strategy and innovation, and practical tools to use on real-world business challenges. And it will help you answer even more questions, including:

• Which ideas are worth pursuing?
• How do you identify and overcome obstacles to change?
• Should you set up an innovation arm?
• Do you need to change the culture to support organizational innovation?
• How do you introduce an entrepreneurial mindset throughout your organization?

The program combines faculty-led lectures with hands-on experience. During the program, you’ll collaborate with peers and apply the frameworks you learn to real-world innovation challenges. You’ll also have other opportunities to exchange ideas with Stanford GSB faculty and peers through ice breakers, Q&A, and other activities throughout the week.

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll attend as part of the program.

What AI Can and Cannot Do

What are reasonable, and unreasonable, expectations for how AI might transform your business? In this session, we set out to demystify AI, discussing what it is suited for and what falls outside its scope. It explores how AI can be designed not just to automate tasks but to enhance human cognitive capacities, enabling new forms of collaboration between humans and machines. This session also delves into examples of intelligence augmentation, showcasing how AI can assist in creative problem-solving, decision-making, and expanding the boundaries of human knowledge and capability.

Corporate Entrepreneurship

In this session, we will examine 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.

Neuroscience to Inform Decision-Making

The exponential growth in our understanding of the workings of the human brain has led to a rather startling and maybe embarrassing (even depressing) conclusion.

While the human brain is unique among species in its ability to strategize, conceptualize, hypothesize, memorize, etc., it is now undeniable that most human decisions are shaped by nonconscious instinctual neural systems and processes.

In these sessions, you will first gain an understanding of the workings of the instinctual brain and then leverage that understanding to be more effective at making decisions and influencing others’ (e.g., key stakeholders’) decisions.

Thinking Inside the Box

Research shows that you will deliver more creative solutions if assigned a task that includes restrictions compared with a task in which you have free reign. It turns out that, with creative tasks, structure helps. This finding also extends to tasks in which people are asked to ideate new products or develop concepts for marketing campaigns. In this session, we will discuss an approach to product ideation that introduces five templates or “recipes” that can help you structure your thinking and develop both incremental and disruptive ideas. We will discuss each template and practice applying it, workshop-style, to your own products or services.