The world is changing in an increasingly fast speed and the continuous change is the new rule. Professionals from the most various areas will do tomorrow things differently than they do today, will develop new methods, use new tools to organize themselves and will face other challenges and needs.

How to become a protagonist and augment your firm's ability to "innovate smarter"?

Take this workshop to discuss and understand how to better utilize the diversity of expertise that resides within your own organization and in the innovation networks in which your firm is embedded..

About the Workshop

This workshop addresses the role of executive protagonism in developing a firm's capability for breakthrough (disruptive, radical, transformative) innovation – a primary source of sustained competitive advantage and economic growth. We distinguish between what leaders need to do during invention and innovation, and emphasize barriers that hinder established firms’ capabilities to produce breakthrough innovations. We examine how strategic leaders can augment a firm’s ability to “innovate smarter” by better utilizing the diversity of expertise that resides within the organization and within the firm’s partnerships. The concepts we will discuss are grounded in decades of research on creativity and innovation management, as well as strategy, leadership and teams. Emerging concepts such as open innovation and experimental entrepreneurship will be largely covered. We will discuss how strategic leaders apply these concepts.

The workshop is grounded in two fundamental tenets: (1) as shapers of organizational context and culture, leaders play a critical role in developing an organization’s capacity to innovate, and (2) a firm can innovate smarter by better utilizing diverse expertise, for which firms must increasingly reach beyond their organizational boundaries.

Research demonstrates that more valuable inventions are created at the intersection of different thought worlds. Bringing together people who have had different experiences enables organizations to solve complex problems and to devise better solutions. However, the potential for conflict is greater in diverse groups. Hence, it is not enough for an organization to be populated by people with diverse expertise and perspectives; diversity must be managed as an organizational resource. Leaders are crucial in this process. By articulating coherent narratives around innovation and creating contexts in which people can engage with that narrative in meaningful ways, leaders can reduce cognitive and cultural distances between people working in different domains, lowering the costs to individuals of engaging across organizational boundaries and knowledge domains and fostering broad awareness of the benefits.

Nonetheless, the social, cognitive, political, and economic forces that sustain and encumber breakthrough innovation in established organizations are powerful. We will explore barriers to building capabilities for breakthrough innovation in established organizations, as well as challenges that new ventures face as they seek to scale up initial successes. We then turn to the concepts and techniques that managers can employ to overcome these barriers and challenges, emphasizing the principles of lean start-up, open innovation, and introducing models of organization and leadership that can assist managers in developing their organization’s capability to innovate smarter.

Design by

Bruno Rondani
Head of Wenovate - Open Innovation Center

Bruno Rondani is the head of Wenovate – Center for Open Innovation, Chairman of the Open Innovation Week, lecturer at Fundação Instituto de Administração and associate researcher at Fundação Getúlio Vargas. He received his doctorate in the area of business strategy in 2012 from Fundação Getúlio Vargas, his scientific master degree in Power Electronics in 2005 and Electrical Engineering diploma in 2003 both from Universidade de Campinas. As part of his academic background he participated in exchange programs in University of Virginia, University of California - Berkeley, Babson College and University of Pittsburgh in the US and ESADE in Spain. He also collaborated in developing academic programs with Royal Institute of Technology, Linköping University and Chalmers Technical University in Sweden. He served as scientific board member in EMS, a leading pharmaceutical company in Brazil, in the Global Technical Steering Board at Thales Group, in the Superior Council for Innovation and Competitiveness at the São Paulo Federation of Industry and represented Brazil in the OCDE Symposium on Global Open Innovation Networks in Paris. During his career he hold senior executive positions in Aerospace and Defence programs in Brazil lead by Thales Group and by Saab Technologies. Bruno also started and invested in ten high tech startups, with a score of two corporate acquisitions exits and one IPO. Bruno is an Eisenhower Fellow and head of Inova Venture Partners.

  

Susan K. Cohen
University of Pittsburgh - Associate Professor of Business Administration Organizations and Entrepreneurship

Susan K. Cohen has been on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh's Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business since 1997.Her research examines how firms enhance their performance (innovation output and quality, survival, and profitability) through research and development activities. She is particularly interested in how firms manage tensions between acquiring, protecting, and leveraging their technological knowledge by structuring internal and external capabilities. Dr. Cohen’s research shows that the complexity, specificity, and tacitness of a firm's technological knowledge may protect radical product innovations from imitation but not incremental Dr. Cohen is studying the implications of knowledge architectures for organizational architectures. Her research suggests that particular attributes of a firm's technological knowledge enable it to exploit certain positions in alliance networks better than others, has implications for a firm's vertical scope, and affects how incumbents can best respond to disruptive innovation. She draws on theories of innovation, technological change, modularity, organizational learning and adaptation, ecology, and social networks to investigate these issues. Her work extends resource-based theory and the dynamic capabilities perspective by exploring the imitation and substitution, and their effects on sustainable performance Dr. Cohen received her PhD in Strategic Management at the University of Minnesota. She has been published by the Oxford University Press, Strategic Management Journal, Blackwell Publishers, and others. She also works with the Magee-Womens Research Institute and local biotech firms to identify business models for commercializing the technologies from particular Her hobbies include running, rowing, soccer, hiking, travel, books and movies, and volunteer work for childrens' organizations (e.g. Make-A-Wish).


Where: WTC Fórum | Av. das Nações Unidas, 12551, Brooklin Novo
Language: this edition will be given in Portuguese
Instructor: Bruno Rondani
Length: 16 hours
Certificate: available
Target: Corporate Executives
Prerequisites: be a Corporate Executive