Innovation and Organization Course of MBA at Hitotsubashi University
ICS , Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy
[Term 4] Innovation & Organization (E. Osono) (2009/Term 3&4 (Spring&Summer))
The annual reports of many companies talk about their aim to come up with innovation. However, it is not easy. Why? It is because it is often difficult for an organizational environment that encourages innovation to co-exist with an organizational environment that supports the efficient and reliable execution of an established business. For innovation, you need an organizational environment that encourages innovation, namely, risk taking, an action orientation, learning from failure, and slack resources, to name a few. For execution, there must be accountability for the results and less tolerance for failure.
This course builds on the knowledge in Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior, and Innovation Management to deepen your understanding of organizational design, management practices, idea generation, and the experimentation process for innovation. It tries to answer such questions as, “how can I make my group innovative?” and “what are the critical characteristics for idea generation and the experimentation process?” (Module 1), “what is the organization that encourages innovation rather than hinders it like?” (Module 2), and “how can we develop innovative new businesses within a large organization?” (Module 3). In addition, throughout the course, students will be asked to conduct some individual-level exercises outside of the classroom, which will ask you for example, “Do at least one thing differently from your normal routine” and “Make all of your mundane decisions on an intuitive yes/no basis.”
This course has two aims. One is to help you develop to become a better player as an individual who can take different perspectives, pay attention to details, and be mindful. The second is to help you develop to become a better team leader of innovative projects. You do not have to wait until you climb up the corporate ladder to make your company more innovative. There are many things you can do. Understanding several core factors for innovative organization will give you the foundation.
The Term 2 (Winter) course, Innovation & Competition, which focuses on the strategy side of innovation management, and this course are complementary but independent enough so that those students who did not take Innovation & Competition will still learn effectively.
Teaching Method
The course is case-oriented. The core factors of innovative organizations are not complicated, but how to implement them in organizations is the challenge. Hence, we learn from best practice companies in innovation such as IDEO, 3M, Toyota, Bandai, and IBM. Learning will take place from discovering why these core factors are critical through interactive discussions, your own effort to apply critical factors to cases, exercises, as well as comments from your fellow students. Also, we invite guests to the class to learn from their experience of dealing with the critical factors.