Assume Future Technology Leadership:

• Mobilize more effective, motivated, entrepreneurial team efforts
• Rapidly commercialize technical advances and innovative ideas
• Exercise leadership and decision making under technological and market uncertainty
• Develop critical management skills and allocate technical resources in changing organizational and economic environments
• Promote and lead system change within established corporate cultures
  

Leading and Motivating Technical Professionals

Using a new managerial framework for understanding how professionals’ motivations change
Designing the task characteristics of a highly motivating work environment
Improving the integration and long term vitality of technical professionals
Managing and dealing with creative ‘mavericks’
Managing technical professionals who have ‘plateaued’

Managing Uncertainty

• Understanding how motivation, innovation, and uncertainty are interrelated
• Dealing with risk and uncertainty
• Leveraging the creative tension between the generation and reduction of uncertainty
  

Managing Technology Transfer and Communication

• Understanding the role of the technical gatekeeper 
• Recognizing the effectiveness of alternative organizational structures including project, functional, and matrix-type approaches 
• Dealing with the effects of physical location and organizational architecture on technical communications and innovation

Staffing the Innovation Process and Managing Technical Professionals

• Moving technical professionals into leadership roles 
• Recognizing and balancing the critical functions necessary for carrying out innovation 
• Designing managerial systems, including dual ladder, career assignment, evaluation, reward, and recognition systems 
• Developing critical skills for reducing new product development cycle time 

Commercializing Technical Capabilities

• Linking technology with market strategy for successful innovation in the marketplace 
• Managing technology/marketing interfaces and cross-functional relationships 
• Maintaining creativity in long term technical efforts
• Encouraging, protecting, and sponsoring entrepreneurial risk-taking and team efforts 
• Improving the transfer of technical knowledge into new products and services 
• Understanding the effects of centralized/decentralized structures on communication and innovation 

Managing the Decision Making Process

• Managing the tensions between development efforts and schedule pressure 
• Structuring and leading decision making processes 
• Involving other functional areas and building consensus 
• Minimizing the detrimental effects of organization politics 

Creating and Maintaining High Performing Technical Organizations

• Building collaborative cross-functional teams 
• Building and sustaining motivation, performance, and innovation over time 
• Identifying the skills, characteristics, and managerial styles of effective technical leaders 
• Utilizing ‘marshaling’ events for overcoming the Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome 
• Using culture to gain high commitment and innovative work climates 

Managing the Ambidextrous Organization

• Balancing the tensions between short- and longterm technical efforts
• Managing incremental, breakthrough, and discontinuous innovations
• Managing streams of innovation across technology cycles
• Developing leadership styles and capabilities for managing innovation streams  

Integrating Technology With Strategic Management

• Examining patterns of product and process innovation
• Coupling strategic plans with organizational evolution
• Investigating and understanding strategic contingencies as product classes evolve
• Identifying key patterns of successful innovation   

Leading Entrepreneurial Efforts to Foster Breakthrough Innovation

• Strategies for leading the adoption of both sustaining and disruptive technical advances
• Diagnosing root causes of performance problems and resistances to change  
• The role of executive leadership in shaping and managing change and decision making
• Using influence and power more effectively to lead innovative activities

This 3-day course is specifically designed for executives, vice presidents, R&D directors, high-level managers, and senior technical professionals responsible for technology development or the management of innovation for new products or services.