Design Innovation + Leadership

Course Overview
The course is building on the learnings of the first semester of Strategic Design and Management of Parsons the School for Design, and will examine prevailing frameworks of innovation such as reverse, open, and disruptive innovation to identify and categorize contemporary innovations. The ways in which innovators describe their own innovations and processes will be examined, compared and assessed in terms of their validity and applicability. Additionally, the course will explore and encourage the development of leadership skills for entrepreneurs.

This course prepares and enables students to:

 * Assess their capacity as entrepreneurs, leaders, and inspirers of new ventures in for-profit as well as social sectors.
 * Leverage that capacity in relation to others, and motivate, inspire, and stimulate a shared vision.
 * Enables others to act.
 * Encourage the heart and work with emotions.
 * Model the way for others to aspire, imitate, and mimic.
 * Challenge the traditional processes of new venture initiation.
 * Creatively and innovatively propose an entirely new, (paradigmatic approach to seemingly familiar require an entrepreneurial intervention.
 * Generate their own critical perspective about the impact, opportunities, but also challenges and problematic issues for the design leader.
 * Implement a project requiring leadership.

Three Course Modules
Innovation and leadership are being widely used almost to the point that they have become nearly meaningless as a starting point for a serious academic discussion. Therefore, this course’s unique value proposition is based not just by providing a broad design contextualization, but also by providing the students with a rigorous scholarly basis. This course aims at giving students the confidence to be change makers, fusing innovation and leadership, while challenging them to do so using a human-centered and humanistic approach. The course looks at three levels: entrepreneurial/personal, corporate/organizational and systemic.

Module 1: Leadership and innovation - Individual Level
In the first module students learn on leadership and innovation from an entrepreneurial/personal perspective.

Module 2: Leadership and innovation - Organizational Level
In the second module students learn on leadership and innovation from an corporate/organizational perspective.

Module 3: Leadership and Innovation - Systems Level
The third module provides a systems thinking perspective to design innovation and leadership. Our scope of systems is broad, from complex organizational systems to social and economic systems.

Other languages

 * Chinese wikiversity (beta)