In today’s business world, organizational success is highly dependent on innovation. In addition to the fact that innovation allows organizations to stay relevant in the competitive market, it also plays an important role in economic growth and society. The ability to resolve critical problems depends on new innovations.
Innovation challenges - as part of the concept of Open Innovation - usually build on the insights that knowledge is broadly distributed in society and hence capitalizing on the “wisdom of crowds” can be effective and efficient.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to two major approaches on how organizations can proactively pursue innovation activities: creative problem solving (CPS) and collective intelligence (CI). By following the hands-on approach of creative problem solving in a structured way, students will learn and live the principles of solving innovation-related challenges – spanning from defining the problem and generating possible responses to evaluating and selecting a final solution for implementation. In addition to being able to execute innovation challenges internally in an organization, students will acquire timely skills on how to tap into external knowledge by means of distributed innovation systems. Distributed innovation systems are an approach to organizing for innovation that seems to meet the challenge of accessing knowledge that resides outside the boundaries of any organization.
The phenomenon-based approach of collective intelligence emerges through many different applications in innovation management and technology plays an increasingly important part in this. Technology facilitates the development and maintenance of crowdsourcing platforms where people can come together in order to exchange information. Unlike simple problems which have obvious fixes, making progress on complex problems requires dealing with uncertainty and multiple unknowns. Collective Intelligence draws on a combination of data, technology and diverse human skills to address different aspects of uncertainty. In addition, AI is already being used by many businesses and is a great opportunity to augment collective intelligence in real ways.
During this course, students will resolve real-world innovation challenges relating to the working world or the broader society and develop new creative solutions in multidisciplinary teams. The course aims to provide theoretically-based understandings of complex real-world innovation challenges, allowing the student to conceptualize innovation related issues and to reflect on these in a practically informed manner. In addition, students will leave the course with enhanced skills in the areas of team building, leadership and project management.
Besides, it deliberately leverages the exceptional entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem provided by SSE and Stockholm by integrating different player like the SSE Business Lab, companies such as Scania, Klarna or Spotify and international field experts sharing their insights and experiences.
Faculty: Kathrin Reinsberger
Course Date & Time
Wednesdays, 10:15 - 12:00 (CET) and/or 13:15 - 15:00 (CET)