Fusion — Curriculum — EPOM 413
Innovation, Strategy and Leadership — Contemporary Approaches to Future Growth
Innovating inside an enterprise, where the constraints are rarely technical. Global shifts and technological change create the opportunity; culture, risk appetite, and strategic mindset decide whether an organization can act on it.
- Term
- Summer 2027
- Credits
- 3
- Program
- Engineering, Innovation Management & Leadership
- School
- Case School of Engineering
The course
The overall goal of this course is to address the process of innovating in an enterprise context. Outside the enterprise, global shifts, economic developments, and technological evolution all present opportunities and challenges for innovation-based organizations. Inside it, company culture, acceptable risk and reward profiles, and strategic mindset all influence whether innovation actually produces value.
Building on the IP management and commercialization activities that follow a new discovery — see EPOM 410 — and on needs-based innovation and design — see EPOM 411 — this course examines how organizations respond effectively to the challenge of innovation from strategic and leadership perspectives.
Approaches to strategic leadership under innovative pressure: successful endeavors, flops that should have worked, and an honest embrace of the many choices and factors that underlie competitive innovation. The failures are as instructive as the successes, and frequently more so.
How the course runs
Students work individually through the semester on the problem of structuring innovation, applying the tools and methodologies presented in the course. Course leaders and presenters are drawn from across the university and from industry.
Analytical and philosophical understanding is reinforced by hands-on assessment of two case studies presenting applications of law and policy in the context of strategic technology innovation and leadership. For each, the team's task is to identify what factors drove the circumstances and the outcome.
The objective is a working command of the strategic options available when leading an innovative enterprise through the conversion of innovative potential into a strategically competitive solution.