Leading the Technology Driven Enterprise

This course bridges academia and practice through an original ‘Leadership Framework’ enabling participants to solve real professional problems. In two days, its unique practitioner-led design translates general concepts to concrete applications for student development and critical discussion. Leveraging peer-to-peer learning and Senior Lecturer coaching, students develop a concrete action plan to implement in their organizations as change leaders. Student feedback confirms that the course helps them own and lead real life change projects in an effective and sustainable way.

Keywords

Interactive learning critical thinking

Course description

Project description

Leading the Technology Driven Enterprise in the 21st Century requires leadership skills that go beyond traditional technology and enterprise boundaries. The participants are MAS students with high levels of technical education and an average of 8 years of post-experience. This class taught ‘by practitioners for practitioners’ with a professor, integrates academia and practice in an innovative and applicable way.

The Goal of this 2-day Course is to enable participants to understand how innovation can drive disruptive changes in enterprises and developing the competences to manage such changes. The course is organized in 4 modules: Innovation, Change Management, Leadership and Application. Students bring a real challenge from their workplace and develop an action plan for immediate implementation.

During 16 intensive hours, the course distills learnings from relevant case studies (discussed in a flipped-classroom setting), introduces an innovative practitioner-designed ‘Leadership Framework’ for participant use, and leverages peer learning and coaching by instructors throughout the course.

In so doing, by the end of this course, the students will have learnt how to:

1. analyze a change situation, identifying relevant stakeholders and potential obstacles to change

2. identify needs and problems of each stakeholder, learn how to engage them in a discussion about change and build a critical mass of support

3. transform their needs’ analysis into concrete steps to align possibly conflicting views of a problem and, hence, have a clear action plan to implement change right after the end of the modules

Prior to the start of class, the participants are assigned specific case readings and questions to test their understanding. The cases are selected to bring insights on how cutting-edge technology is developed and applied in a disruptive way across industries, focusing on Digitalization and Industry 4.0. The participants identify and share with the lecturers, in advance, a specific challenge of importance to them, in their company. The practitioner instructors review this input and customize the course to align their in-class mentoring with student specific situations during the 4 modules.

1. The LTDE course is developed in a way to enable each participant to build upon their individual situation in their professional careers. Its core Leadership Framework helps students define a real problem in their organization through methodical ‘Why, How, What’ definition.

2. Participants identify the core stakeholders, and the potential obstacles to change that each face. The stakeholder map is developed in class, customized around their problem with Change Management actions, and discussed and adapted throughout the two days.

3. Participants are strongly engaged to work on an individual ‘real life’ problem in the class. Time is set in the agenda to apply the Leadership Framework approach on developing a plan of action through peer teamwork, individual coaching and an ‘elevator pitch’ presentation with feedback.

4. Participants have to co-design (relying on peer-to-peer interaction) a ‘real’ plan of action that they must present as a 90 second elevator pitch to the three lecturers and the whole class at the end of the module. Peer-to-peer interaction and feedback provides useful ‘reality checks’ and strengthens the plan.

Each offering of this class in the MAS (2016 to 2019) and MBA (2017) programs has generated high student satisfaction with specific success stories.