Contents
Catalog Links
Share

CS4925 Innovation Leadership

Accelerating the pace of innovation in a world of accelerating change driven by accelerating digital technology is a DOD priority. Starting from the premise that innovation is adoption of new practice in a community, this course teaches the essential practices of innovation leaders who successfully produce technology adoption. The course covers the foundational practices of communication that support the leadership practices. The course teaches advanced practices for navigation through contingencies and surprises, and for mobilizing communities around new practices. Students will complete a project to produce an adopted innovation. Prerequisites: None.

Lecture Hours

3

Lab Hours

2

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course students will be able to do the following.

  • Articulate an understanding of how computing and information technology is shaping the combat operational environment and how innovation leaders can accelerate technology transfer into that environment.
  • Interpret innovation as emergence or adoption of new practices in a community and apply this interpretation to innovation opportunities.
  • Articulate commonly held theories of computing technology adoption and transfer and their susceptibility to failures.
  • Learn the eight practices for sustained adoption of technology innovation: sensing, envisioning, offering, adopting, sustaining, executing, leading, and embodying; demonstrate basic competence through exercises and innovation project.
  • Learn the foundational action-generating practices of communication: request, promise, offer, declaration, assessment, assertion, and conversation for action.
  • Learn supporting distinctions in social power, resistance to innovation, moods that affect productivity, and listening for concerns in the community.
  • Acquire basic skills to navigate in a world full of uncertainties, surprises, contingencies, and unexpected events.
  • Acquire basic skills to mobilize followers to adopt and sustain the new practice.
  • Demonstrate an integration of the above innovation skills through an innovation project that achieves early adoption of new practice in their communities.