Innovation into action

Beedie’s Executive Education serves up leading-edge programming for professionals

Innovation is at the heart of Executive Education offerings from SFU’s Beedie School of Business – making a pivotal link between academia and the professional world.

The Executive Education team at Beedie collaborates with organizations and leaders seeking powerful ideas and innovative approaches for driving their industries forward – designing everything from short courses and workshops to industry dialogues and corporate MBAs.

A recent example: Earlier this year, a workshop was held with a unique focus on re-energizing organizations and employees with digital media vehicles. It was part of the Ideas@Work series, delivering learning to managers and organizational leaders through research and collaboration.

The first event, playing to a sold-out audience, focused on engaging workforces with social media. Entitled “Creating an Innovative and Engaged Workplace – Twitter and Beyond”, the event was co-presented by two leaders in the social media space: Beedie professor Jan Kietzmann and Telus Senior Director of Learning and Collaboration Dan Pontefract.

Kietzmann is an award-winning researcher whose article “Social Media? Get Serious!” was awarded the scholarly best paper prize for 2011 by Business Horizons. Pontefract is the author of the recently published book “Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization”.

Kietzmann outlined the building blocks of social media from the theoretical perspective of a honeycomb model – demonstrating how each social media achieves different goals. LinkedIn, for example, allows individuals and organizations to focus on identity, relationships and reputation, while a platform like YouTube is the optimal vehicle for sharing, conversations, groups and reputation.

Pontefract made the case for why leadership in organizations needs to move away from Draconian to collaborative and democratic.

A firm’s culture can result in either disengaged and “siloed” teams or an engaged and connected company. To this end, he affirmed the meaning of “social” in social media simply doesn’t work in a culture of rigidity, isolation and command-control.

On the other hand a culture that values learning, leadership and collaboration among employees is perfectly suited to successfully integrating social media into a workforce’s culture.

Presentations by Pontefract and Kietzmann were followed by a collaborative section – featuring group and plenary discussions to share experiences from a wide range of industries — from health care and retail to gaming and consulting — and company sizes.

Another Beedie Executive Education program that is sure to turn heads from Vancouver’s yoga fashion design studios all the way to the catwalks of Milan: The inaugural Italian program, in partnership with SDA Bocconi School of Management.

This new program teaches managing creativity and innovation in the fashion and design industries.

Organizations across all industries have made harnessing innovation and creativity a priority in their efforts to maintain and expand their competitive advantage. Fashion and design industries embody this notion at the core of their business models as they face constant pressure to innovate while being scrutinized by media and the public alike.

The program takes place in aforementioned Milan, Europe’s creative hub, to explore the Italian model of new product development in fashion and furniture design – bringing home latest practices and ideas that make organizations more innovative and creative.

For more information about Executive Education at Beedie, including Ideas@ Work and the inaugural Italian program, contact Kristina Henriksson.