Wharton@Work

December 2025 | 

Ideas into Impact: Wharton’s Certificate in Innovation

Ideas into Impact: Wharton’s Certificate in Innovation

Innovation isn’t a flash of genius or the job of a single department. It’s a discipline anyone can learn — and a capability every organization needs. Wharton Executive Education’s new Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate is designed to help professionals at all levels turn creative thinking into tangible results.

Developed and taught by Professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, two of Wharton’s leading authorities on innovation and entrepreneurship, the fully online, self-paced program takes participants step-by-step from understanding what innovation means to generating and testing real solutions. It combines Wharton’s analytical rigor with a focus on practical action.

Each of the three courses — Introduction to Innovation: Everyone Is an Innovator, Innovation Tournaments and the Process View, and Design Thinking for Problem Solving and Innovation— can stand alone, but together they form an end-to-end journey toward becoming a more confident and capable innovator. “Innovation isn’t confined to a department or a job title,” says Terwiesch. “Every professional faces problems that don’t have obvious solutions. The difference is whether you have a structured way to solve them.”

A Framework You Can Learn — and Apply Anywhere

Too often, innovation is treated as an accident of creativity. Terwiesch and Ulrich teach it as a discipline: a set of methods that can be practiced, refined, and mastered. “When people learn a clear, repeatable approach,” Ulrich explains, “they stop guessing. They start experimenting intelligently.”

The first course, Introduction to Innovation, builds a foundation for understanding what innovation looks like inside different organizations. Participants learn to map an innovation portfolio and create the conditions for new ideas to take root. The second course, Innovation Tournaments and the Process View, brings structure to the challenge of finding and evaluating ideas. It introduces a method the professors pioneered for surfacing promising opportunities at scale, a system used by companies worldwide to turn a flood of possibilities into focused results.

The final course, Design Thinking: Developing the Solution Concept, moves from idea to execution. Guided by Ulrich, learners apply the “triple diamond” model, which begins with identifying customer needs and ends with refined, tested solutions. “The framework helps you think systematically about creativity,” he says. “You start by understanding the problem, generate options, test them, and learn from the results. By the end, you’ve built something that’s both imaginative and feasible.”

Artificial intelligence plays a supporting role throughout. “AI is fantastic at generating ideas,” Terwiesch notes, “but leaders still have to decide which ones to pursue. Innovation requires both breadth and judgment — you want many ideas, and then the wisdom to pick the right ones.” Participants learn how to use AI tools to enhance ideation and prototyping while maintaining human insight at the center of decision making.

Each course blends short video lectures with applied assignments and hands-on activities. Participants conduct customer interviews, generate and refine solution concepts, and evaluate them using proven techniques. Completing all three programs earns the Wharton Executive Education Certificate in the Science and Practice of Breakthrough Innovation, a credential that signals both knowledge and capability. “We wanted participants to do more than watch lectures,” Ulrich says. “You build skills that transfer directly to your work the next day.”

Innovation for Everyone

For Terwiesch and Ulrich, innovation is less about hierarchy than about mindset. “At the individual level,” Ulrich explains, “you become a better problem solver. At the team level, you learn to mobilize others to tackle challenges. And at the organizational level, you gain a repeatable approach for making innovation part of the culture.”

That layered impact is what distinguishes Wharton’s approach. The certificate integrates rigorous frameworks with practical tools, showing how to lead innovation whether you manage a team, advise clients, or run your own venture. “We’ve taught thousands of executives around the world,” Terwiesch says. “This program captures what we’ve learned about how people actually innovate inside organizations.”

What participants practice inside the program mirrors the realities they face at work. Across industries, organizations are navigating rapid technological shifts, new customer demands, and the influence of AI, making the ability to innovate systematically more valuable than ever. “Organizations are under tremendous pressure to deliver both incremental and radical innovation,” Ulrich observes. “They need people who can do that reliably, not just to come up with ideas, but to turn them into outcomes.”

Both professors bring decades of experience to the task. Terwiesch, co-director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, is a leading researcher on process innovation. Ulrich, Wharton’s vice dean of entrepreneurship and innovation, is also an accomplished designer and entrepreneur. Together, they translate years of academic insight and practical experience into an accessible, action-oriented learning journey. “We’re not teaching theory for its own sake,” Ulrich says. “We’re teaching methods that work — methods that can be used the next day.”

In the end, the program reinforces a simple truth. “Everyone is an innovator,” Terwiesch reflects. “Innovation isn’t about job titles; it’s about leadership: the ability to see possibilities where others see constraints and to guide people toward better ways of doing things.”

The certificate offers professionals the perspective and tools to do just that, transforming everyday challenges into opportunities for meaningful change.