Exercizing Innovation with Magda Ropotan

The purpose of this course is to both understand and practice innovation mindsets and techniques that are today embraced by successful companies. It will offer practical models, tools and methods for starting and managing innovation projects in an organization, in harmony with its strategic focus, commercial goals and available resources. We will touch topics that are theoretically grounded in marketing, innovation, leadership and management literature. More specifically the course will address the following topics: – Aligning innovation with business strategy – establish an innovation focus in line with your organization’s goals and strategic priorities. Learn how to align your key stakeholders, how to build an innovation team and how to plan for success by keeping your key stakeholders involved along the journey – Search new insights and innovation opportunities – identify relevant groups, topics and themes to explore in order to find compelling insights. Create the right questions to ask. Learn how to extract customer frictions and actionable insights. – Generate new ideas – design and run an effective ideation process that builds on the insights and learnings acquired on the way. Learn how to manage the creative flow and move effectively between the divergence and convergence process. – Create new concepts – move from a creative idea to an actual concept of a solution/product/service. Learn how to collaboratively involve others in creating concepts and how to prepare them for being shown to the real world – Prototype and test your concepts – Rapid Prototype and learn different ways to test your ideas with customers in a fast, cheap and efficient way. Learn how to incorporate feedback from testing, how to identify which concepts to keep and which ones to kill. – Develop a business case for your new concept – prepare your concept for being presented to your stakeholders. Learn which elements are essentials to present in a business case for a new concept. This course will not touch elements of copyright and intellectual property.

About the lecturer

Magda Ropotan is an established Innovation Coach and Consultant in Romania, a practitioner of Design Thinking, Service Design, Foresight, Trend & Future Driven Innovation, and Art of Hosting methodologies. She is an alumnae of Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, Institute for the Future – Palo Alto, California and is one of the few Master-Facilitators of FORTH Innovation Methodology in the world.

Magda co-founded Design Thinking Society, a boutique consultancy for design driven innovation, and FutureStation, a consultancy business that supports organizations in exploring trends and future scenarios. Besides her consultancy work, she is a board member at Innovation Labs Romania and Antreprenoria, and a lecturer for Innovation at The Entrepreneurship Academy. Once a year, she is curating and organizing the largest conference exclusively dedicated to Design Thinking in Romania: Design Thinking Forum.
Before moving into consulting, Magda a had a successful career in Honeywell, Genpact and IKEA, both in Romania and abroad.

We are now offering you the option to join one of our EMBA courses. You will join us for a half day of the class, which will give you a taste of the EMBA experience, whilst also giving you the chance to meet the lecturers and current students. We have limited places for guests per each course, so please email [email protected] to check for availability.