COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 290I-1

COURSE TITLE: Managing Innovation

UNITS OF CREDIT: 3

INSTRUCTOR: Henry Chesbrough

E-MAIL ADDRESS: chesbrou@haas.berkeley.edu

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION (HTTP URL):

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Mondays 6pm - 9:30pm

PREREQUISITE(S): none

CLASS FORMAT: case discussion, some lecture, some outside speakers

REQUIRED READINGS: Two Books: 1) Open Innovation, by Henry Chesbrough, 2) Open Business Models, by Henry Chesbrough; and a Course Reader for cases and articles

BASIS FOR FINAL GRADE: 40% Class Discussion, 30% take-home exams, 30% Final Project

ABSTRACT OF COURSE'S CONTENT AND OBJECTIVES: Most innovations fail.  Yet companies that don’t innovate die. Managing innovation thus constitutes one of the most difficult and critical tasks facing a manager.  Nor is this solely the concern of high tech companies – companies in traditionally “low tech” businesses such as consumer packaged goods (like Procter & Gamble) find that innovation translates directly into organic growth in new businesses, and better profits in existing businesses.

This is not a course on all theories of innovation. For one they keep changing, and for another, I have some that I am really excited about that I want to share with you.  The goal of the course is to identify the sources of innovative success and failure inside corporations, and how companies can develop and sustain a capability to innovate. We will pay particular attention to Open Innovation, a theory that I framed and has become quite popular.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: Henry Chesbrough, an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business, at the University of California, Berkeley, is an internationally respected expert on innovation. Chesbrough has written extensively on the topic of innovation, but he is best known for his work on open innovation. Wikipedia calls him “the father of open innovation”.

Open innovation, as the name suggests, describes innovation that occurs beyond the closed doors of a single organization. For example, the open source movement, which created the computer operating system Linux, is an extreme example of open innovation. A number of companies, including Procter & Gamble, are now applying the idea to gain access to the best experts from around the world.

Chesbrough has been teaching at Haas since 2003.  Previously he was Assistant Professor and Class of 1961 Fellow at the Harvard Business School, where he taught for 6 years.  He studied at Yale University where he received a bachelor of arts in economics summa cum laude. His MBA is from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and he has a PhD in business administration from the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. After graduating from university, Chesbrough first worked in strategy consulting at Bain, and then for Quantum Corporation in California, at the time a leading hard disk drive firm, where he held a number of product management and marketing positions.