• understand the different approaches to innovation-based organization design, how these approaches work in practice, and their possible benefits and costs—particularly “satellite” and “systemic” approaches.
• be knowledgeable about how various organizations presented in the course—both private and public—have designed themselves for innovation, and how these designs do and don’t work

Common knowledge holds that innovation is essential to organizational health and survival, a belief recently confirmed by large-scale, global studies that show strong causative relationships between organizational innovation, longevity, and long term success^[1]. Getting to innovation requires a search for, and the incorporating of “valuable difference”— unusual ideas, processes, markets, operations, strategies. Yet, difference doesn’t sit well with organizational imperatives for predictability and continuity. As Rosabeth Moss Kanter^[2]notes:
 
“At its very root, the entrepreneurial process of innovation and change is at odds with the administrative process of ensuring repetitions of the past. The development of innovation requires a different set of practices and different modes of organization than the management of ongoing, established operations where the desire for or expectation of change is minimal.” (p. 170)
 
Thus, while many business organizations are struggling to establish difference-driven processes in their organizations—changing reporting relationships, incentives, search strategies, and so on—most most of these initiatives soon fall apart or wither away. Organizational identity, culture, or structural inertia get the better of the effort. A few companies, however, have had more long term success: e.g., Boeing Moonshine, Disney’s Imagineering, Proctor and Gamble’s Clay Street Project, and Nike’s Innovation Kitchen are skunk-work-like approaches to establishing parallel innovative and creative capacities in traditional industries. Less obvious organizations like Maersk or the Danish tax ministry have also created such parallel structures.
 
If the challenge is how to develop the innovative organizations, a promising solution lies in design theory and practice. Creative companies like IDEO, Google, Alessi, 3M, and Lego are placing it at the center of how they do business. While design has historically been limited to areas like service and product design, these are now being supplemented by design-based approaches to strategy, new ventures, branding, organizational structure, operating processes (e.g. designing meetings), communication, job development, production, reward systems, and information systems—all in the service of designing innovative organizations.
 
The purpose of this course is to a) give students a general overview of how innovative organizations are designed, b) provide students with some basic organizational design skills for innovation, and c) provide an opportunity for problem-based learning, where design knowledge and skills are applied to an organizational design project.