SEMESTER: Spring 2018

COURSE NUMBER: EWMBA 290T.3

COURSE TITLE: Managing Innovation & Change

UNITS OF CREDIT: 2

INSTRUCTOR: Henry Chesbrough

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

CLASS WEB PAGE LOCATION (HTTP URL): bCourses

MEETING DAY(S)/TIME: Mondays 6:00pm to 9:30pm.

PREREQUISITE(S): none

CLASS FORMAT: The class will meet in person over 10 weeks, with a mixture of lecture and case discussion, and an occasional outside speaker.

REQUIRED READINGS: Two Books: 1) Open Innovation ISBN 13: 978-1-4221-0283-1, by Henry Chesbrough, 2) Open Business Models ISBN 13: 978 -1-4221-0427-9, by Henry Chesbrough; as well as case studies and article selections.  At least three of the case studies will be new for this year.

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.  Innovation is also the most sustainable source of organic growth for a company.

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.  Open innovation involves both bringing external ideas and technologies into your own innovation process, and also allowing unused internal ideas and technologies to flow outside for others to use in their innovation process.  We will also want you to contribute your own experiences with innovation in your organization, both what has worked and, even more, what hasn’t worked.  Getting your own experiences into the discussion will be an important, shared, objective for you and the instructor.

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, most pharmaceutical companies routinely seek out promising university spinoff companies from academic medical centers, and license in their compounds.  Or consider the open source movement, which created the computer operating system Linux, as another example of open innovation (particularly when we include the business models that many companies use to embrace and leverage open source).  Empircally, a survey of large companies conducted in 2013 and again in 2015 found that nearly 80% of large companies in Europe and North American were practicing at least some parts of the Open Innovation model.  As one industry manager put it, “Before Chesbrough’s work, the lab was our world.  After it, the world has become our lab.”