Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/406930
28 November/ December 2014 BizEd 28 November/ December 2014 BizEd Consider Both Result and Process A t Adolfo Ibáñez, we view innovation as both a result and a process. Considered as a result, innovation can be any new or nontrivial change in our products, services, or processes that solves worthy problems or meets needs and creates payback for the innovators. Considered as a pro- cess, innovation is the discovery- driven journey by which a team chooses a challenge and generates an innovation by solving it. Inno- vation is a social process that's all about impact; it's where the humanities, economics, manage- ment, and technology meet. Our university was founded about 60 years ago to create impact on the Chilean industry, and we measure ourselves against that mission. More than a decade ago, we started looking at ways to incorporate innovation into the curriculum. We began by exploring several questions: How can we achieve results similar to those in the U.S. and Europe? How can we foster innovation-based value creation? And driven by AACSB standards, how can we assure learning? We believed we could teach our stu- dents how to create value within both startups and corporations by helping them understand the inno- vation process, investments and patents, and other topics. But we didn't just want our students to learn about innova- tion; we wanted to prepare them to actually innovate. Because we focus on enabling learning and building capacity, we emphasize activity and project-based learning. We have experimented for more than a decade to refine our educa- tional process, using our courses as laboratories. Along the way, we've learned some interesting lessons. For instance, people fail at innovating when they cut corners, when they search for "great ideas," and when they can't cope with high levels of risk, uncertainty, and ambigu- ity. Innovators don't just have to put in long working hours, they must do so in emotionally difficult environments. Therefore, we take our under- graduate, graduate, and exec ed students out of their comfort zones, because the magic happens in unfa- miliar places. For instance, we've created a "personal innovation" course, managed by a psychologist, an actor, and a plastic artist. Adults are often insecure about their abilities to draw or paint and shy about acting or making presenta- tions in public. But on innovation teams, people need to communicate visually and verbally, and they need to be comfortable in places where they don't think they have the abilities to perform. The three professors help students overcome their fear of failure in these areas. This is only one of the methods we use to nudge students out of their comfort zones. We also generate an environ- ment of high perceived risk and uncertainty. While students receive feedback about their work, they don't know their grades until the end of each module. When- ever they ask professors how to approach a task or design a deliv- erable, they hear: "Talk to your team. You're supposed to deal with ambiguity." In addition, we let them know change can happen at any time and in any area: deadline, content, information. When stu- dents from the fourth generation of our master's program set out on their international seminar, they didn't know until they were at the airport where they were flying or what companies they would visit. Innovation is a social process that's all about impact; it's where the humanities, economics, management, and technology meet. CARLOS A. OSORIO Director, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program Adolfo Ibáñez Business School in Santiago, Chile