The Lally School of Management & Technology

 

Companies seek top line growth through many venues: geographic and market expansion, acquisition, and organic growth via innovation. The ICE program focuses on the latter. ICE is a research-informed, process-driven framework for guiding and structuring critical management systems tied to innovation across multiple levels of the organization.

 

Research conducted by the Lally School of Management & Technology over the last 10 years has focused on the processes and competencies essential for repeatable breakthrough innovation in established companies. The research has demonstrated that to succeed at innovation, companies must not only know how to innovate quickly in response to market needs, but they must also lead markets with breakthroughs based on novel technologies and novel insights.  We have taken these learnings and identified the management system elements that must be created and institutionalized within organizations to achieve a repeatable, sustainable innovation competency. 

 

The ICE instructional model delivered to 8-10 non-competing corporations, occurs at 2 organizational levels simultaneously over an 8 month period, and promotes building infrastructure, developing and overseeing a portfolio of major innovations, and strategy in accordance with the innovation mandate of the company.  Senior management and project teams engage in participatory and interactive workshops and seminars presented by expert academics & practitioners in the field.  

 

 

Specific objectives include:

 

a) To help senior leaders develop an awareness of innovation as an emerging function in companies,

 

b) To help senior leaders learn how to build a management system for innovation that coexists with the predominant management system for operational excellence, and

 

c) To help project teams develop a working understanding of how to manage projects that have the potential to be breakthroughs, fraught with high levels of uncertainty on numerous dimensions.

 

 

Two audiences within the company are involved in the program, with separate tracks:

 

A) Senior leadership who are concerned with building an innovation capability in their companies--building infrastructure, developing and overseeing a portfolio of major innovations, and who set strategy in accordance with the innovation mandate of the company. (2-3 senior leaders are welcome to attend. We strongly suggest that at least 2 attend together.)

 

B) Project teams (one 2 or 3 person team from each company). Note: While the team must be identified, the project need not. Each team should come to the program with two or three project ideas they have identified.

 

The ICE instructional model promotes building infrastructure and developing and overseeing a portfolio of major innovations and strategy in accordance with the innovation mandate of the company. The workshops will be interactive and participatory, presented by expert academics and practitioners in the field. Corporate involvement will occur at two organizational levels simultaneously over an eight-month period:

• Senior leaders engage in sessions and activities associated with understanding and developing a management system for innovation. This system would operate in parallel with the dominant management system of operational excellence that pervades most established companies. They apply their learning to the task of initiating or improving the innovation functions in their companies over the course of the program.
  
• In parallel, a separate track of sessions will be held with the project team to help them learn appropriate processes for managing a project with breakthrough potential. They will apply these tools to a project considered to have breakthrough potential with their company.
  
• Twice during the program, the two groups meet together.
  Senior leaders are taught how to evaluate and work with project teams, in accordance with appropriate governance criteria, metrics, and cultural norms that encourage breakthrough innovation.