Innovation Tournaments and the Process View

Great ideas don’t just appear. They need a process that finds them, tests them, and scales them. Innovation Tournaments and the Process View equips you with a proven, tournament-based framework to transform ad-hoc creativity into a powerful engine for growth. Guided by Wharton Professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, you’ll learn to design, launch, and evaluate innovation tournaments that consistently surface the best opportunities.

You will master the four levers that maximize payoff – More Ideas, Better Ideas, Better Selection, and More Variance — and apply them directly to your own challenges. Along the way, you’ll build tournament architecture, mobilize participants, and integrate results into your organization’s innovation culture. By the end, you’ll leave with a complete playbook for running tournaments that unlock creativity at scale and convert it into measurable impact.

Course Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

This course provides a hands-on, systematic method to discover and elevate the best ideas.

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Design and run live innovation tournaments that systematically surface exceptional ideas, from framing challenges to selecting winners
• Apply the four scientific levers (more ideas, better ideas, better selection, more variance) to maximize innovation payoff
• Frame challenges strategically using tools like the problem ladder, “How might we…” statements, and the Three Horizons framework
• Build organizational capacity and culture by linking tournaments to employee engagement, design thinking, and strategy execution
• Create merit-based evaluation systems that reduce bias, ensure fairness, and enable diverse ideas to thrive
• Develop a continuous learning agenda for innovation, using discovery-driven planning, iteration, and feedback loops to sustain progress 

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.

This is the second 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

Karl Ulrich, PhD
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:

• 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