Programs for Students

At the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation, students have access to leading resources, including world-renowned academic staff, business executives, and multinational companies. The center offers courses that challenge and equip students to solve real life problems, and real world business issues by leveraging Open Innovation concepts. Each course offers fresh perspective, inspires curiosity, and promotes intellectual growth. Students have the opportunity to work alongside multinational companies, and engage with leading executives throughout their creative process. The skills developed in each of the Garwood courses give students a better understanding of current business models– an unparalleled opportunity to interact with industry leaders inside and outside the classroom setting.

Student Project Opportunities

Students are challenged to create innovative solutions for established business models. Students are divided into teams of five and are assigned to solve real-world problems for major corporations. Each group has an opportunity to present the company with an overview of the company’s financial position, the company’s strengths, and weaknesses. Teams formulate a plan to restructure or rethink a significant line of business. Students are then given the opportunity to present their work and receive feedback from leading executives.

Work with Leading Corporations

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.

Graduate Courses

Organizational Moonshots, Spring 2019

Instructor: Professor Henry Chesbrough
Class Hours: Mondays, 4-6pm

About the course

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.

 

 

EW290T: Open Business Models & Open Innovation

Instructor: Henry Chesbrough

About the course

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.