The Garwood Center offers students the opportunity to work with cutting-edge ideas, technology, and companies. For example, the undergraduate course, Open Innovation Leveraging IBM Watson, offers technical and business students access to the Watson Developer Cloud and the training to build a Watson-based app. These students will be among the first to have hands-on access to the cutting-edge Watson technology. The Garwood Center frequently adds new courses to take advantage of the latest ideas and technologies for innovation.

Innovation in most large companies these days is fairly incremental.  There is nothing inherently wrong in this, as much of our progress as a society has resulted from such innovation.  This course, however, departs radically from incremental innovation.  Instead, we look at organizations who intentionally set extremely ambitious innovation objectives, where incremental innovation cannot get the job done.

In this course, we will call this process of creating and executing a non-incremental, radical project an “organizational moonshot”.  We will examine this process against a backdrop of how society transforms new science into new progress, and look at organizations in private, public and non-profit contexts.  We will see both successful and unsuccessful cases, and will discuss the internal organization of these initiatives, as well as their external objectives.

Business Model Creation through Collaborative and Interactive Learning Project Based Course working with Senior Corporate Executives This course presents an opportunity for those students who are passionate about employing their innovative and creative talents to learn the process of Open Innovation to address the business model challenges of real companies. To demonstrate the solid understanding of the process, concepts and strategies, the students work in groups of five to seven to formulate a solution to the problems the companies are currently facing. Students work with respective Senior Corporate Executives who present their challenges. This includes exploring new business models and prospective markets in light of the changing economic landscape, social trends, and emerging technological advances. The intent of the course is to create heterogeneous groups to leverage the diverse experiences, skill-sets, and tacit knowledge of individuals within each group to frame and solve problems. The groups tap into both internal and external ideas, generated on ideation platforms, to explore and create innovative business models to deliver products and services. Sourcing of external ideas from a larger and diverse population is preferred in building good business models.