How to Develop Breakthrough Products and Services
MIT Sloan's 15.356 tackles a concrete problem: most firms know they need major innovations to survive but lack a repeatable process for generating them. The course draws on research into the innovation process to teach systematic methods for generating and developing breakthrough ideas, rather than treating innovation as a matter of individual genius or luck. Rather than staying purely theoretical, sessions bring in outside experts who present real cases from their own work, showing how each idea generation method plays out in practice and where it gets messy. Materials available through MIT OpenCourseWare include the syllabus, readings, and assignments used in the actual class, letting you follow the same sequence MIT students work through. The course is aimed at students and practitioners interested in product development, entrepreneurship, or management who want frameworks for breakthrough innovation rather than incremental improvement. As with all MIT OpenCourseWare offerings, the material is free to access with no certificate attached.