About the course

Innovation is a big buzzword in today's business media. There are many people who argue that the right kind of innovation can solve almost any problem a company faces. In fact, some directly link an organization's approach to innovation to their likelihood of survival.

It's important to remember, however, that innovation is driven by people. Therefore, it's not so easy to find reliable models that allow us to analyze the behaviors of our workers and help foster innovation in a company.

In this course, you will familiarize yourself a model of innovation competence composed of three dimensions. This model can be applied to self-evaluate your own innovation competences or those of the people working in your organization. In this way, you will be able to detect needs and establish personalized training actions, as well as collect evidence of the results of possible interventions carried out to promote innovation.

What you will learn

By the end of this course, you will know:

  • How to define the innovation model and describe its components;
  • The relationships between innovation components;
  • Examples of innovative behavior;
  • Self-diagnosis of innovation competences;
  • How to evaluate other people's innovation competences;
  • How to design a plan to improve the competence of one's own innovation or that of other people.

About the instructors

Ph. D. Juan A. Marin-Garcia is an Associate Professor, member of the Departamento de Organización de Empresas at the Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain). He has been Lecturer in Management, Teamwork and Human Resources Management since 1994, in the Degrees of Industrial Engineering and Business Management. Moreover, he is also Lecturer and Coordinator in Master courses and PhD programs. He is involved in the training of university lecturers and staff. Concerning these areas, he has also worked as a consultant for some companies in Spain and El Salvador (Central America). He is founder member of the Research Groups ROGLE and i-GRHUP where he develops research tasks in different projects. He is also founder member and designer and developer of pedagogical activities at IEMA (Innovation Group for Assessment and Active Methodologies). His main research areas are Participative Management, Continuous Improvement, Lean Manufacturing Systems, TQM, TPM, Performance Evaluation and Active Learning in Higher Education. He is Chief Editor of two academic journals: Working Papers on Operations Management, and Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management. He is also Associate Editor in REDU-Revista de Docencia Universitaria.

Ángeles Andreu-Andrés is Associate Professor at UPV. Since 1992 she teaches at the Universitat Politècnica de València. She works on topics related to active methodologies (teamwork, simulation and games, role-playing games, round tables, etc.), the design of computer-assisted games and evaluation, with papers in these fields. She belongs to the group of Innovation in the Evaluation for the Improvement of Active Learning (IEMA) of the Universitat Politècnica de València and the research group DIAAL (Intercultural Dimension and Active Language Learning) of the same university since its foundation.

Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara (Phd) teaches Information Systems and Management and Services Marketing at Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV); he is also working as a freelance consultant, writer and teacher in secondary school. He has taught and participated in conferences and seminars in Britain, Ireland, Germany and in South America (Colombia, Peru, Brasil and Bolivia). He is member of the ITIO research group (Integration of Information Techonology in Organizations) and IEMA (UPV) and has participated in 27 research projects and contracts with different organizations, being the responsible of 7 of them. His research interests are the application of information systems in organizations (ERP, organizational learning, elearning and crowdsourcing) and software engineering.

Duration: 6 weeks, 3-4 hours per week

Language: English

Instructors: Juan A. Marin-Garcia, M. Ángeles Andreu-Andrés, and Fernando González-Ladrón-de-Guevara

Institution: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia

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