Full program description
Innovation isn’t guesswork or an isolated spark of creative genius — it’s a discipline that can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate is Wharton Online’s end-to-end innovation credential, built across three self-paced courses that take you from fundamentals to execution. You’ll gain research-based frameworks and hands-on tools to lead innovation with clarity and confidence — applying them to products, services, processes, and organizational challenges of every kind.
Guided by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, globally recognized scholars, consultants, and entrepreneurs, you will move step by step from understanding the fundamentals of innovation, to running large-scale processes that surface high-potential ideas, to applying design thinking to create and test compelling solutions. Along the way, you will learn to balance creativity with rigor, leverage AI to accelerate ideation, and integrate innovation into your organization’s culture.
Program Experience
Highlights and Key Outcomes
This three-course sequence provides a complete system: where to innovate, how to generate and select ideas, and how to execute them at scale. Each course builds distinct skills — literacy and strategy, process discipline, and design thinking — and together they empower you to deliver innovation that is strategic, systematic, and user-driven.
Upon completing the full Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate, you will be able to:
- Lead innovation with confidence by applying a complete toolkit spanning strategy, process, and design thinking
- Link creativity to business value by connecting innovation initiatives directly to financial performance and competitive advantage
- Balance risk and opportunity using frameworks like the Three Horizons, alpha assets, and innovation tournaments to allocate resources strategically
- Engage teams and culture by embedding inclusive, merit-based innovation practices that energize employees across levels and functions
- Leverage emerging technologies like AI to amplify ideation, evaluation, and decision making without losing human judgment
- Translate learning into action by designing and executing innovation processes that deliver measurable results in dynamic, real-world business contexts
Completing all three courses not only equips you with Wharton’s most powerful innovation tools — it also earns you the Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate, a credential available exclusively through the full bundle. This signals to employers and peers that you can lead innovation from idea to impact.
Self-paced and delivered entirely online, each course in the certificate includes four in-depth modules (four to six hours each). You’ll learn through a blend of video lectures, applied activities, and proven frameworks, with every individual course culminating in its own digital completion badge.
Guided by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich — co-authors of Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities — you’ll gain direct access to the scholars who pioneered structured approaches to breakthrough ideas. Recognized worldwide for both research and consulting, they bring rigorous scholarship and real-world expertise to help you build a practical roadmap you can apply immediately.
Learning Journey
Course 1: Introduction to Innovation — Everyone Is an Innovator
Build the foundation to see opportunities everywhere. You’ll practice:
- Spotting real innovation opportunities and defining their value
- Analyzing challenges from the lens of project, process, and strategy
- Identifying unique “alpha assets” that fuel competitive advantage
- Mapping innovations to revenue, cost, and growth levers
- Balancing market pull vs. technology push, and short-term exploitation vs. long-term exploration
- Responding to disruption with agile, AI-enabled innovation practices
Course 2: Innovation Tournaments —– The Process View
Turn creativity into results with a proven process. You’ll practice:
- Designing and running live innovation tournaments that uncover winning ideas
- Applying the four scientific levers to maximize payoff: more ideas, better ideas, smarter selection, and greater variance
- Framing challenges strategically using “How might we…” and the Three Horizons
- Building innovation culture by linking tournaments to engagement and strategy
- Ensuring fairness and reducing bias with merit-based evaluation
- Creating a learning agenda that keeps your organization innovating long after the tournament ends
Course 3: Design Thinking for Problem Solving and Innovation
Solve the right problems with a structured, customer-centered approach. You’ll practice:
- Applying the triple-diamond model to move from defining jobs to be done, through insights, to compelling solutions
- Conducting customer research that reveals authentic, non-obvious, and powerful insights
- Generating bold solution concepts using ideation methods, group-individual hybrids, and AI tools
- Selecting and testing the best concepts with structured evaluation and customer feedback
- Embedding design thinking in your organization’s DNA for repeatable, user-driven innovation
Tuition
The tuition for the full three-course Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate is $3,850. Enrolling in the complete certificate provides a seamless pathway through all three courses at a bundled rate, ensuring you gain Wharton’s entire innovation toolkit and the recognized credential in one cohesive experience.
Faculty
Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions; Co-Director, Mack Institute for Innovation Management, The Wharton School
Karl Ulrich, PhD
CIBC Endowed Professor, Professor of Operations, Information and Decisions, Professor of Management
Who Should Attend
The Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate is designed for professionals across industries who want to drive meaningful impact through innovation. Ideal participants include:
- Individual contributors and managers who want to sharpen daily problem-solving skills
- Team leaders and high potentials responsible for mobilizing groups around innovation challenges
- Executives seeking to align innovation practices with organizational strategy
- Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs eager to test and scale new ideas with credibility