About the course
Design Driven Innovation is Ivey’s introductory course to customer-driven innovation processes, e.g., Design Thinking or Agile. Innovation is where strategy meets execution, and it is one of the hardest things for any organization to do well. This graduate course gives students a deep, practical command of how innovation actually works across products, services, and processes; in high-tech and low-tech industries; and in both established firms and new ventures. Students will learn to diagnose innovation problems, innovation-centric strategies, and build the organizational conditions that let good ideas survive contact with reality.
The first half of the course deals with the “How” of innovation, and the second half the “When and Why” of the practicalities of managing innovation. The course explores how firms tap employee creativity, identify and combine the resources an innovation needs, foster a culture that sustains it, and strike a balance between generating new ideas and capturing value from them. It blends conceptual frameworks with applied analysis, drawing on case studies, current industry examples, and discussion-based learning.
About the role
We are seeking an instructor who can connect rigorous innovation concepts to current practice. This role would suit either an academic with a strong record in innovation, entrepreneurship, or strategy, or an experienced practitioner (a senior leader, founder, consultant, or innovation executive) who can teach conceptually grounded material and bring it to life through real examples. Ivey is a case-method school; so experience with discussion-based, experiential, or case teaching is an asset, and support is available for candidates newer to the format.