This week, hundreds of students from throughout the Global Network for Advanced Management are traveling for Global Network Week mini-courses offered by network schools. Thirty of them are visiting Yale for something new: a mini-course initiated and organized by fellow students.

The student organizers, Alexandra Bigler ’17, Hannah Grill ’17, and Allison Mishkin ’18, are all members of Yale SOM’s Design and Innovation Club. Through the course, they intend to explore the role of innovation with their counterparts across the network and discuss how design thinking can bring new ideas to life.

“The ability to generate new, compelling ideas in a constructive and iterative manner is a valuable skill for leaders of businesses at all stages,” the students wrote in a description of the course. “This module explores innovation as a process and how it can be systematized at the individual and organizational level and applied to a variety of business challenges.”

More than 160 students from Global Network institutions around the world applied for the 30 places in the module; the selected attendees will represent 19 of the 29 schools. Bigler, Grill, and Mishkin, who co-designed the mini-course alongside Yale SOM faculty, invited several guest lecturers to speak on each of the five days; course topics include “Reframing the Problem,” “Agile Project Management,” and “Elements of Design.” Participants will work together to solve a problem of their choosing, and then present their findings at the end of the week.

The students also worked with Yale alumni in the field to organize company visits to the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Center and ?What If! Innovation Partners in New York City.

Yale SOM will also be hosting a second Global Network Week offering, reprising its longstanding module “Behavioral Science of Management.”