Gain a fundamental understanding of how to drive operational innovation and implement operational excellence across your organization.

Transforming operations into an engine for growth and innovation requires a combination of strategic and creative thinking. The Emerging COO: Driving Innovation and Operational Excellence focuses on both, providing a comprehensive learning and doing experience.

Strategy and finance. Value chain innovation and agile manufacturing. Design thinking and lean startup. From the incremental to the disruptive, the rigorous, experiential curriculum will provide you with the skills to lead impactful change in your organization.

Below is just a sample of the sessions you’ll experience as part of the program.

Strategic Leadership

Why are some companies more competitive than others? To be successful, a manager must be able to diagnose the reasons behind successes and failures, and to be able to effectively improve performance in the future. You will be introduced to key strategic concepts used to understand firm performance. You will learn how to explain why some firms perform better than others, describe and explain the logic of an organization’s strategy, and apply the strategy identification framework. We will also discuss the process of forming a strategy, how to identify when a strategy needs to be updated, and how to incorporate A/B testing and consumer feedback into the strategy formation process.

AI-Powered Decision Making 

Develop a practical understanding of responsible analytics and AI, including the strengths, limitations, and appropriate uses of different models. Explore how prescriptive AI can help leaders navigate complex tradeoffs, optimize outcomes, and create value under real-world constraints. Through a hands-on exercise, examine applications such as resource allocation, bottleneck identification, pricing decisions, and managing uncertainty. You’ll also gain insight into how executives can engage more effectively with data scientists and leverage AI-powered tools to accelerate analysis, innovation, and decision-making.

Finance and the Creation of Value

Even the best and most innovative ideas will go nowhere unless we can convince others to commit the necessary resources. Doing so almost always requires that we make a compelling case that the value of the opportunity far outweighs the upfront costs. You will gain experience building a financial model to assess a proposed new product launch. We will consider key financial metrics that are often applied and learn which ones are reliable (and which are not). We will also look at how we can use the financial model to guide our attention as project managers in order to maximize the impact of our efforts.

Value Chain Innovation

Most of us think of innovations as new product features, new functionalities, or new offerings that customers value. But for any product to be successful, we must think of the value chain in which the product is created or manufactured. Although we use the term “product,” it applies to service as well, as often times there is a whole value chain that supports the provision of a service. What are some of the value chain innovations that could help make your innovative product successful? Can we expand the source of innovation ideas to include value chain partners and leverage all their innovation powers? How can we garner the support of external and internal partners to increase the success rate of new innovation initiatives?