Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

This three-course sequence provides a complete system: where to innovate, how to generate and select ideas, and how to execute them at scale. Each course builds distinct skills — literacy and strategy, process discipline, and design thinking — and together they empower you to deliver innovation that is strategic, systematic, and user-driven.

Upon completing the full Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate, you will be able to:

• Lead innovation with confidence by applying a complete toolkit spanning strategy, process, and design thinking
• Link creativity to business value by connecting innovation initiatives directly to financial performance and competitive advantage
• Balance risk and opportunity using frameworks like the Three Horizons, alpha assets, and innovation tournaments to allocate resources strategically
• Engage teams and culture by embedding inclusive, merit-based innovation practices that energize employees across levels and functions
• Leverage emerging technologies like AI to amplify ideation, evaluation, and decision making without losing human judgment
• Translate learning into action by designing and executing innovation processes that deliver measurable results in dynamic, real-world business contexts

Completing all three courses not only equips you with Wharton’s most powerful innovation tools — it also earns you the Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate, a credential available exclusively through the full bundle. This signals to employers and peers that you can lead innovation from idea to impact.

Experience and Impact

Self-paced and delivered entirely online, each course in the certificate includes four in-depth modules (four to six hours each). You’ll learn through a blend of video lectures, applied activities, and proven frameworks, with every individual course culminating in its own digital completion badge.

Guided by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich — co-authors of Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities — you’ll gain direct access to the scholars who pioneered structured approaches to breakthrough ideas. Recognized worldwide for both research and consulting, they bring rigorous scholarship and real-world expertise to help you build a practical roadmap you can apply immediately.

Learning Journey

Course 1: Introduction to Innovation — Everyone Is an Innovator

Build the foundation to see opportunities everywhere. You’ll practice:

• Spotting real innovation opportunities and defining their value
• Analyzing challenges from the lens of project, process, and strategy
• Identifying unique “alpha assets” that fuel competitive advantage
• Mapping innovations to revenue, cost, and growth levers
• Balancing market pull vs. technology push, and short-term exploitation vs. long-term exploration
• Responding to disruption with agile, AI-enabled innovation practices

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Course 2: Innovation Tournaments and the Process View

Turn creativity into results with a proven process. You’ll practice:

• Designing and running live innovation tournaments that uncover winning ideas
• Applying the four scientific levers to maximize payoff: more ideas, better ideas, smarter selection, and greater variance
• Framing challenges strategically using “How might we…” and the Three Horizons
• Building innovation culture by linking tournaments to engagement and strategy
• Ensuring fairness and reducing bias with merit-based evaluation
• Creating a learning agenda that keeps your organization innovating long after the tournament ends

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Course 3: Design Thinking for Problem Solving and Innovation

Solve the right problems with a structured, customer-centered approach. You’ll practice:

• Applying the triple-diamond model to move from defining jobs to be done, through insights, to compelling solutions
• Conducting customer research that reveals authentic, non-obvious, and powerful insights
• Generating bold solution concepts using ideation methods, group-individual hybrids, and AI tools
• Selecting and testing the best concepts with structured evaluation and customer feedback
• Embedding design thinking in your organization’s DNA for repeatable, user-driven innovation

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Tuition

The tuition for the full three-course certificate is $3,850. Enrolling in the complete certificate provides a seamless pathway through all three courses at a bundled rate, ensuring you gain Wharton’s entire innovation toolkit and the recognized credential in one cohesive experience.