Developing the skills to foster innovation within organisations.
This course explores the personal and organisational skills needed to build cultures of innovation that are adaptable, resilient, and capable of driving meaningful change.
ABOUT THIS COURSE
Organisations who are not constantly adapting their offerings are bound to be irrelevant in a short period of time. Now more than ever, organisations need to adapt, create and execute, but this requires leaders with a new set of skills and mindsets. Creativity, fearlessness, empathy, systems thinking, storytelling, these are all abilities that leaders nowadays can develop and foster in their own organisations. Creating a culture of innovation is therefore the ultimate competitive advantage, but doing this requires deliberate, systemic intervention: reshaping how people work, how decisions are made, how performance is measured, and how individuals are motivated to think, experiment, and collaborate. Technology or breakthrough products offer only temporary advantages. The true differentiator is designing an organisation with the enduring capability to innovate repeatedly.
Most organisations are better at surviving than at genuinely adapting to their internal and external realities. But doing this requires leaders who master the soft skills that make innovation happen. This course will help participants understand which are the skills that are needed nowadays, and to learn how to develop these themselves and in others. This five-day programme treats organisational innovation as a design and management challenge: how do you develop the personal and organisational skills to build a culture of innovation that is resilient, sustainable, and a source of long-term competitive advantage?
The answer lies in deliberate, systemic intervention across four interdependent pillars: the Strategy that sets direction and signals what the organisation values; the Structures — governance, teams, incentives, decision-making — that either enable or suppress creative work; the Skills — both analytical and interpersonal — that allow people to lead change rather than merely execute it; and the Tools and methodologies that make innovation repeatable rather than accidental.
Drawing on innovation management research, behavioural science, and organisational theory, participants build both the conceptual frameworks and the practical instincts needed to influence how their organisations think, decide, and evolve.
INNOVATION IMPACT for industry participants
Participants leave the programme with more than theoretical knowledge. Over the five days of , we will build a working understanding of all four levers organisations can use to increase their innovation potential — and, critically, how these levers interact.
KEY LEARNINGS
PRACTICAL METHODS & APPROACHES
TARGET AUDIENCE
This programme is designed for early- to mid-career professionals who are moving beyond execution-focused roles and beginning to navigate the messier, more strategic dimensions of organisational life — cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder influence, change processes, and innovation from within.
You don’t need to be leading an organisation to take this course. You need to be curious about why some organisations adapt and others don’t, and motivated to become someone who can actively shape that difference. Whether you are in a design, product, strategy, operations, or general management role, this programme gives you the language, frameworks, and tools to understand how innovation cultures are built — and to start building one, wherever you sit.
Senior students preparing to enter complex organisational environments are equally welcome: this is a course about understanding how organisations actually work, and how to influence them with purpose and credibility.
Luis has worked at the intersection of business, design and the social sciences for more than 28 years. Luis was founder and CEO of INSITUM, one of the leading global innovation consulting firms worldwide--acquired by Accenture in 2019. During five years, Luis was the global design leader at Fjord and Accenture Song, and now is an independent consultant.
Luis studied Industrial Design in Mexico City (1994) and has a Masters degree in Design Planning from the Institute of Design in Chicago (1998). He has lived and worked in Mexico City, Chicago, Barcelona and Sao Paulo where he has been a professor, speaker, entrepreneur, investor and consultant.
Luis has been involved in more than three thousand projects most of them focused on helping leading organizations create an Innovation culture and promote user-centred innovation in a wide variety of sectors. His areas of expertise include organizational innovation, human-centered design / design thinking, design research, service design, CX, and innovation strategy.
In his spare time, Luis practices cycling and badminton.
PY is a designer with over 30 years of practice across non-profits, consulting, and global corporations.
He holds a degree from Les Ateliers (École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle), Paris.
From 1991 to 2000, before taking on corporate responsibilities, PY ran Design Co Operation, an NGO he founded in Harare, Zimbabwe, co-developing products and services with small-scale informal entrepreneurs.
Since 2000, he has led design at Moen, Legrand, Orange, Philips Lighting, and Signify, and served as Global VP of Experience for Publicis Sapient France — consistently using design to look at the whole picture.
As he liked to tell non-designer colleagues: “don’t ask a designer for a bridge — ask them what’s the best way to cross the river.”
PY has served two terms on the Executive Board of the World Design Organization, advised the Design Management Institute, and chairs the Professional Advice Council of CY School of Design in France.
