ICSB is proud to announce a new global initiative to fulfill our mission of continuing management education with the goal to promote entrepreneurship. The ICSB Global program constitutes state-of-the-art certificate programs, including the ICSB Global Certificate Program on Creativity and Innovation.

Years ago, creativity and innovation were mainly associated with art, entertainment or recreation, and only in very particular cases, was it related to the world of organizations. However, given our current reality, this has very much changed. Currently, innovation and in particular, creativity, are considered fundamental to organizational development, most specifically for those that are entrepreneurially focused. This is clearly depicted in the World Economic Forum report in 2016, in which creativity is ranked among the three most important skills required for 2020. This presents a serious demand for organizations to incorporate innovative strategies for their own competitiveness in a global context. Furthermore, they have to create new products and services in order to stay relevant. Innovation is decisive with respect to the levels of competitiveness in companies, sectors and also within the economy of the nations. Today, executives and organizations must carry forth professional innovation management in their particular context, and therefore, each organization and entrepreneur must model their business in a unique way that allows them to combine the detection of opportunities and of successful execution capabilities.

This ICSB Global program incorporates ICSB partners which include George Washington University, St. John’s University, UC Berkeley, San Diego State, UMKC, United Arab Emirates, Qatar University, Salerno University, Catholic University, and others representing a truly global constellation of experts.

The ICSB Global Creativity and Innovation program now offers a unique in-person and online, educational, hybrid instruction model through which participants can join in-person at different ICSB-dedicated events. Alternatively, participants can take the modules exclusively online. Otherwise, participants can alternate between joining both in-person and online sessions. Each ICSB Global certificate requires you to complete three (3) mandatory modules followed by two (2) elective modules from the many options provided. This ICSB Global certificate offers an invaluable experience of being able to interact with participants from across the globe and from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, and knowledge. ICSB brings over 60 years of knowledge to this certificate program.

Certificate in Creativity and Innovation for Entrepreneurs Modules

Module One: Think as an artist: Creativity for the Design of effective products and service

The objective of this module is to present an actionable approach to the design of “beautiful” products and services. Why beauty? Because recent and breakthrough findings in Cognitive science about how the mind perceive complexity show that the pursuit of beauty is the way our brain understand the world and make decisions opting for the most elegant solution. In this module we will use visual art and neuroscience to show how artists achieve elegance and translate this into a set of eight strategies that can be used to improve design and enhance creativity.

Contents

• Entrepreneur as artist: Innovation as delivery of new meaning through the design of effective artifacts
• What makes a design beautiful? Lessons from Designers, Cognitive Science and Complexity Theory
• Think as an artist: 8 strategies to achieve elegance and simplicity in Design

Module Two: Creativity and Design thinking: how to design effective Organizations

A visual, design thinking approach is applied in this module to the design of effective organizations as well. A new venture is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model (Ries, 2013). Using visual tools to design and simulate business models, in this workshop participants will learn how visual thinking and simplicity can help in the design of lean as well as effective ventures:

Content

• What is a Business models (building blocks)
• Visualize your business model: Lean canvas/Business model canvas
• Cases studies of effective business model design and BM driven innovation

Module Three: Where do good ideas come from?

This online module will present a review of the most well known theories about sources of innovation: where do good ideas come from? Can innovation be designed? Which are the characteristics of highly innovative systems and how can we replicate them and apply to our business idea? Theories will be presented through successful cases and examples from the real world based on 4 types of innovation sources:

• Innovation from marginal markets: Disruptive innovation
• Innovation from Industry: the dynamic of innovation in Industry
• Innovation from Smart collectives: Information Economy and Peer-production, innovation in online communities (open sources, makers), Open Innovation
• Innovation from tradition, history, culture, and territory

Module Four: Customer discovery

The design of a new venture is very far from the linear, rational, and top down business planning approach. It is instead a learning path constellated with failures as well as with valuable learning opportunities. The Lean start-up approach in the design of new ventures puts at its center the art of customer discovery. Customer discovery implies an agile mindset based on continuous experimentation, feedback, and painstaking revision of the initial idea. In this module we present a structured approach to customer discovery and offer tools to support all its fundamentals steps: engaging users in the idea development, fast prototyping, testing ideas, refining and retesting.

Electives: Pick From Other Modules

• Innovation and Academic Research
• Process of Innovation
• The Role of Government to Promote Innovation
• Creativity Through story Telling
• Engineering and Creativity Unleashed

Contact:

ICSB Global Program Director: Dr. Tony Mendes (email: mendesa@umkc.edu)
ICSB Global Program Assistant: Ms. Jordyn Murphy (email: jordyn@icsb.org) or tel: 202-994-0704
ICSB President & CEO: Dr. Ayman El Tarabishy (email: aymanelt@icsb.org) or tel: 202-468-3133