Full course description
Innovation is no longer optional — it’s the engine of growth and survival in today’s marketplace. Yet many organizations still struggle to turn bold ideas into results. Introduction to Innovation equips you with the clarity, confidence, and practical tools to approach innovation as a disciplined process — mapping your organization’s efforts, spotting gaps, and applying proven frameworks to guide smarter choices.
Guided by Wharton Professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich — pioneers in the science of innovation — you’ll cut through buzzwords and apply innovation with the rigor of a proven methodology. By the end, you’ll be able to assess your organization’s portfolio, identify imbalances, and chart a clear path forward. You’ll also gain hands-on experience using generative AI to spark ideas, test assumptions, and strengthen decisions — whether you’re leading a team, advising clients, or driving change inside your organization. This course shows you how to move systematically from ideas to outcomes that reshape performance and growth.
Course Experience
Highlights and Key Outcomes
This course builds the foundation for innovation literacy and equips you to see opportunities everywhere.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Recognize and define innovation in their own context, distinguishing between incremental improvements and breakthrough opportunities
- Analyze innovation challenges from the perspectives of project, process, and strategy, understanding how each level shapes outcomes
- Identify and enhance alpha assets—the unique resources that drive sustainable competitive advantage
- Link innovation to organizational performance by mapping initiatives to financial levers like price, volume, cost, and capital efficiency
- Evaluate strategic choices by balancing market-pull vs. technology-push, exploitation vs. exploration, and positioning across the Three Horizons
- Apply iterative and adaptive processes to manage uncertainty, respond to disruption, and integrate AI into idea generation and evaluation
Self-paced and delivered entirely online, the course offers four in-depth modules (4–6 hours each) that culminate in a digital completion badge. It combines video lectures, hands-on activities, and a combination of proven frameworks with examples from leaders and organizations that are successfully advancing their innovation goals.
Certificate Pathway
This is the first course in the three-course Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate. This certificate is earned by completing all three courses in the series:
- Introduction to Innovation: Everyone Is an Innovator
- Innovation Tournaments and the Process View
- Design Thinking: Developing the Solution Concept
Each course may be taken individually, but together they form a comprehensive progression — from building foundational literacy in innovation, to mastering the mechanics of scaling ideas, to applying design thinking to create tested solution concepts.
Completing all three courses not only equips you with Wharton’s most powerful innovation tools, but also earns you the Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate — a credential that recognizes your ability to apply rigorous, practice-based methods to lead innovation across products, services, and organizational processes.
Tuition
The tuition for this course is $1,350. You can also enroll in the full three-course Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate for $3,850 — which brings the per-course cost down to $1,283. Choosing the certificate not only saves you money but also gives you access to the complete innovation system and the recognized Wharton credential.
Faculty
Christian Terwiesch, PhD
Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions; Co-Director, Mack Institute for Innovation Management, The Wharton School
Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions; Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, The Wharton School
Who Should Attend
This course is designed for professionals across industries who want to drive meaningful impact through innovation. Ideal participants include:
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- Individual contributors & managers who want to sharpen daily problem-solving skills
- Team leaders & high-potentials responsible for mobilizing groups around innovation challenges
- Executives seeking to align innovation practices with organizational strategy
- Entrepreneurs & intrapreneurs eager to test and scale new ideas with credibility