More than 75 years have passed since the deaths of famous inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, two scientists, businessmen and innovators who changed our lives forever with the inventions of the telephone and light bulb, respectively, among their many other creations.
Today’s innovators could learn plenty from Edison and Bell, to be sure, but young innovators also have guidance that these historic inventors did not—business schools.
“The reality is that innovation techniques are becoming more sophisticated and teachable and that’s why business schools are embracing it,” says Drew Boyd, Executive Director of the Master of Science in Marketing Program and Assistant Professor of Marketing and Innovation at the University of Cincinnati.
Boyd should know. After working 17 years with Johnson & Johnson, with a decade of those years focused on inventing new medical products, Boyd is an expert at innovation, and is now using his knowledge to educate others. He is a big advocate of Systematic Inventing Thinking [SIT], a method of innovation based on patterns and templates that looks at the solutions first, and then the problems.
“For most people, the right way to innovate is to go through the problems and brainstorm a solution,” he says. “Our method is to use the pattern to create a hypothetical solution and work back to the problem that it solves.”
Boyd says many creative people have used methods and templates to repeatedly create innovation. The Beatles, for example, used a template whereby John Lennon “would come up with the initial movement, the first segment of the song, and Paul [McCartney] would make adjustments to it, use a template/pattern and change that initial movement up or down,” he says. “It was very successful for them.” Business school educators say many templates and methods are used to creative innovation, besides the SIT approach.
One of the most innovative colleges in the country, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, several years ago started an Entrepreneurship and Innovation Track within its business school, the MIT Sloan School of Management. The track focuses on launching and developing emerging technology companies and attracts MBA students who have a deep interest in becoming entrepreneurs. Last year, 90 MBA students at MIT Sloan entered the track, a focus of study that requires them to take various courses and focus on building and creating startup businesses.
Edward Roberts, the founder and chair of the track, and professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management, says this particular program at MIT Sloan allows students to work with domestic and international companies and to collaborate with other MIT departments—such as science and engineering. These team-building efforts can result in collaborations that last long after graduation.
“We’re creating companies,” he says. “The development of ideas and products and the like are coming out heavily collaborated by teaming our students with students and faculty and labs from the rest of MIT.”
John Hauser, Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan who has consulted with numerous corporations, says product development and marketing are central to innovation. “If you think about it, innovation won’t succeed unless consumers want it,” he says. “Once you understand customer needs, then you can begin focusing your efforts on satisfying this customer and then creativity processes and production processes come into play.”
This past year, Roberts says, 40 Sloan MBAs—out of 300 graduates—started their own companies upon graduation, and that number has grown annually.
Other schools have embraced innovation as well. Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business offers a Management of Innovation and Product Development track that focuses on “a process that allows innovation to be ongoing and replicable,” according to the school’s website. Students learn how to solve problems, and how to define them.
North Carolina State University offers an Entrepreneurship and Technology Commercialization Concentration for masters and Ph.D. students “to engage in all stages of company formation and growth,” the school’s website notes. Like at MIT, NC State’s MBA students collaborate with graduate students from other disciplines, such as scientists, engineers and designers, to build start-up companies.
And James Madison University in Virginia offers an Innovation MBA program, which focuses on business fundamentals and leadership development.
Boyd says innovation is not a gift—but is a skill that can be learned like any other skill, such as learning a new language, how to play golf or how to play a new instrument.
“We teach [students] the skill of how to invent the idea,” he says. “We believe innovation is a full process. Being able to invent is such a critical skill, such a high demand skill—and we think it makes our graduate program much more marketable in the job market, if [our graduates] can walk in and say, ‘Hey, I can invent.’”
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