UAE campusWeekdays, Monday to FridayMorning and evening classes
Leadership & Management
Leading and Managing Breakthrough Innovation
Breakthrough innovation requires leaders to move beyond incremental improvement and create the conditions in which genuinely new value can emerge. This involves identifying significant opportunities, challenging established assumptions, mobilizing diverse thinking, managing uncertainty, testing ideas intelligently, and protecting promising innovations from being eliminated too early by conventional operating logic.
Next group
2026 & 2027
- Course fee
- Contact us
- Duration
- 3 days
- Group rate
- Ask an advisor
Course overview
Breakthrough innovation requires leaders to move beyond incremental improvement and create the conditions in which genuinely new value can emerge. This involves identifying significant opportunities, challenging established assumptions, mobilizing diverse thinking, managing uncertainty, testing ideas intelligently, and protecting promising innovations from being eliminated too early by conventional operating logic.
This course equips leaders and managers with a practical framework for leading breakthrough innovation from opportunity identification through experimentation and implementation. Participants will examine innovation strategy, disruptive opportunities, customer and stakeholder insight, creative problem framing, idea generation, portfolio thinking, experimentation, risk, governance, cross-functional collaboration, leadership behavior, and the transition from promising concept to scalable organizational value.
The program combines strategic thinking with practical innovation management. Through cases, opportunity-framing exercises, ideation workshops, concept evaluation, experimentation design, portfolio decisions, and implementation planning, participants will develop an actionable approach for leading innovation while balancing ambition, evidence, resources, and organizational realities.
Training methodology
The course uses an interactive methodology combining short presentations, innovation case studies, strategic opportunity analysis, assumption-challenging exercises, problem-framing workshops, structured ideation, concept development, portfolio exercises, experimentation design, risk analysis, stakeholder mapping, implementation planning, group discussion, and action planning. Participants will apply the tools to realistic organizational challenges and develop practical breakthrough-innovation initiatives.
Target competencies
- Innovation leadership
- Strategic opportunity identification
- Creative problem framing
- Breakthrough thinking
- Idea generation and evaluation
- Experimentation and learning
- Innovation portfolio management
- Risk and uncertainty management
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Stakeholder engagement
- Innovation governance
- Innovation implementation
Course objectives
By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Differentiate incremental, adjacent, disruptive, and breakthrough innovation.
- Identify strategic opportunities for breakthrough innovation using customer, market, technology, and organizational insight.
- Challenge assumptions and reframe problems to create new innovation possibilities.
- Lead structured idea generation and convert promising ideas into clear innovation concepts.
- Evaluate innovation opportunities without applying inappropriate conventional criteria too early.
- Design experiments that test critical assumptions and generate useful evidence.
- Manage uncertainty, risk, resources, and learning across an innovation portfolio.
- Create leadership conditions that support psychological safety, experimentation, and constructive challenge.
- Build cross-functional support and stakeholder commitment for innovation initiatives.
- Develop practical pathways for moving successful concepts toward implementation and scale.
- Create an action plan for strengthening breakthrough innovation within the organization.
Course outline
Module 1
Understanding Breakthrough Innovation
- Defining innovation in an organizational context
- Incremental, adjacent, radical, disruptive, and breakthrough innovation
- Innovation as value creation rather than novelty alone
- Recognizing different levels of innovation ambition
- Understanding why breakthrough innovation carries greater uncertainty
- Distinguishing innovation projects from routine improvement
- Examples of breakthrough shifts in products, services, processes, and business models
- Connecting innovation ambition with organizational strategy
Module 2
Understanding the Leader's Role in Innovation
- Leadership responsibilities across the innovation lifecycle
- Creating direction without prescribing every solution
- Protecting exploration from premature operational pressure
- Encouraging constructive challenge
- Balancing freedom with accountability
- Making resources available for experimentation
- Removing organizational barriers
- Modeling curiosity, learning, and openness to evidence
Module 3
Aligning Innovation with Strategy
- Clarifying strategic priorities
- Identifying where innovation can create differentiated value
- Connecting innovation themes with future organizational needs
- Defining innovation domains and boundaries
- Balancing short-term performance with longer-term opportunity
- Avoiding disconnected innovation activity
- Creating strategic criteria for innovation investment
- Communicating the strategic purpose of innovation
Module 4
Scanning for Breakthrough Opportunities
- Monitoring changes in customers and stakeholders
- Identifying emerging technologies
- Recognizing regulatory and policy shifts
- Analyzing competitor and cross-industry developments
- Identifying changing behaviors and expectations
- Recognizing weak signals and emerging patterns
- Exploring unmet and underserved needs
- Converting external change into opportunity areas
Module 5
Finding Unmet Customer and Stakeholder Needs
- Moving beyond stated requests
- Observing customer frustrations and workarounds
- Identifying functional and emotional needs
- Understanding jobs customers are trying to accomplish
- Recognizing excessive effort and friction
- Exploring non-consumption and underserved groups
- Using interviews and observation for insight
- Translating insight into opportunity statements
Module 6
Challenging Existing Assumptions
- Identifying assumptions embedded in current models
- Separating facts from inherited beliefs
- Questioning established constraints
- Using reversal and 'what if' questions
- Examining rules that may no longer be necessary
- Exploring what competitors and customers take for granted
- Recognizing organizational orthodoxies
- Using assumption challenges to open new possibilities
Module 7
Reframing Innovation Challenges
- Understanding the effect of problem framing
- Moving from narrow symptoms to broader opportunities
- Using 'How might we' questions
- Changing the level of abstraction
- Exploring the problem from different stakeholder perspectives
- Separating desired outcomes from existing solutions
- Testing whether the team is solving the right problem
- Creating clear innovation challenge statements
Module 8
Creating Conditions for Creative Thinking
- Separating idea generation from evaluation
- Reducing fear of premature criticism
- Encouraging diverse perspectives
- Using constraints productively
- Creating psychological safety for unconventional ideas
- Managing dominant voices
- Encouraging quantity before selection
- Maintaining focus on the innovation challenge
Module 9
Generating Breakthrough Ideas
- Structured brainstorming
- SCAMPER and systematic modification
- Analogy and cross-industry inspiration
- Combination and recombination
- Reversal and inversion
- Extreme-user thinking
- Scenario-based ideation
- Building on ideas rather than merely judging them
Module 10
Moving from Ideas to Innovation Concepts
- Clarifying the target user or stakeholder
- Defining the problem or opportunity addressed
- Describing the proposed value
- Identifying the key mechanism of the solution
- Clarifying what makes the concept meaningfully different
- Identifying major assumptions
- Defining expected organizational value
- Creating concise concept descriptions
Module 11
Evaluating Innovation Concepts
- Separating early-stage evaluation from final business-case analysis
- Assessing strategic relevance
- Assessing customer desirability
- Considering technical and operational feasibility
- Considering economic viability
- Assessing differentiation and potential impact
- Identifying uncertainty rather than pretending it does not exist
- Selecting concepts for further learning
Module 12
Understanding Innovation Uncertainty
- Known facts versus assumptions
- Market and customer uncertainty
- Technical uncertainty
- Operational uncertainty
- Financial uncertainty
- Regulatory and stakeholder uncertainty
- Identifying the assumptions that could invalidate a concept
- Prioritizing uncertainty for investigation
Module 13
Designing Innovation Experiments
- Understanding experimentation as structured learning
- Turning assumptions into testable hypotheses
- Selecting the smallest useful test
- Defining evidence before running the experiment
- Using prototypes and simulations
- Testing desirability, feasibility, and viability
- Avoiding experiments designed only to confirm the idea
- Documenting learning and next decisions
Module 14
Using Prototypes to Accelerate Learning
- Understanding different levels of prototype fidelity
- Sketches and storyboards
- Mock-ups and service simulations
- Process prototypes
- Digital prototypes
- Testing critical interactions
- Collecting focused feedback
- Improving concepts through iterative learning
Module 15
Learning from Failure and Negative Evidence
- Distinguishing intelligent experimentation from careless failure
- Recognizing the value of disproved assumptions
- Avoiding blame for well-designed experiments
- Stopping weak concepts early
- Capturing lessons systematically
- Sharing learning across teams
- Avoiding repetition of failed assumptions
- Using evidence to redirect or reshape concepts
Module 16
Managing an Innovation Portfolio
- Understanding portfolio thinking
- Balancing incremental and breakthrough initiatives
- Balancing short-term and long-term opportunities
- Considering different levels of risk and uncertainty
- Allocating resources across innovation horizons
- Avoiding excessive concentration on familiar projects
- Reviewing portfolio balance
- Stopping, continuing, accelerating, or redirecting initiatives
Module 17
Making Innovation Investment Decisions
- Matching investment to the maturity of evidence
- Using staged commitment
- Avoiding large commitments before critical assumptions are tested
- Defining decision gates
- Considering strategic option value
- Using evidence rather than enthusiasm alone
- Recognizing escalation of commitment
- Making disciplined continuation and termination decisions
Module 18
Leading Cross-Functional Innovation Teams
- Bringing together diverse expertise
- Clarifying the innovation challenge
- Defining roles without creating excessive hierarchy
- Managing differences in professional language and priorities
- Encouraging constructive disagreement
- Creating shared ownership
- Maintaining momentum
- Resolving cross-functional barriers
Module 19
Building Psychological Safety for Innovation
- Understanding psychological safety
- Encouraging questions and dissent
- Responding constructively to bad news
- Making it safe to surface uncertainty
- Avoiding punishment for responsible experimentation
- Inviting contributions from quieter team members
- Separating idea criticism from personal criticism
- Combining safety with high performance expectations
Module 20
Managing Resistance to Breakthrough Ideas
- Understanding why new ideas generate resistance
- Recognizing rational and emotional concerns
- Identifying threatened interests and established routines
- Separating useful criticism from automatic rejection
- Using evidence to address uncertainty
- Involving key stakeholders early
- Adapting communication to stakeholder concerns
- Building support without diluting the core innovation
Module 21
Influencing Innovation Stakeholders
- Mapping stakeholders
- Understanding influence and interest
- Identifying supporters, neutrals, and resistors
- Tailoring the innovation narrative
- Connecting innovation with stakeholder priorities
- Using prototypes and evidence to make ideas tangible
- Building sponsorship
- Maintaining stakeholder engagement through uncertainty
Module 22
Communicating Breakthrough Innovation
- Explaining the opportunity clearly
- Communicating the customer or stakeholder problem
- Presenting the proposed value
- Distinguishing evidence from assumptions
- Explaining uncertainty honestly
- Using stories and demonstrations
- Tailoring messages for executives, teams, and operational stakeholders
- Creating confidence without overstating certainty
Module 23
Creating Innovation Governance
- Defining decision rights
- Clarifying sponsorship
- Establishing appropriate review mechanisms
- Matching governance to innovation maturity
- Avoiding excessive bureaucracy
- Creating transparent resource decisions
- Defining escalation routes
- Maintaining accountability while preserving experimentation
Module 24
Managing Risk in Breakthrough Innovation
- Distinguishing uncertainty from manageable risk
- Identifying major innovation risks
- Assessing potential impact
- Reducing risk through experimentation
- Using staged investment
- Planning safeguards for high-consequence tests
- Monitoring emerging risks
- Balancing risk control with innovation speed
Module 25
Moving from Experiment to Implementation
- Recognizing when sufficient evidence exists to advance
- Translating a concept into an implementation model
- Identifying process and capability requirements
- Clarifying technology and resource needs
- Preparing operational stakeholders
- Defining ownership
- Planning phased implementation
- Maintaining learning during rollout
Module 26
Scaling Successful Innovation
- Distinguishing pilot success from scalable success
- Identifying what must remain consistent
- Identifying what can be adapted
- Building repeatable processes
- Developing required capabilities
- Managing infrastructure and resource demands
- Monitoring customer and operational outcomes
- Avoiding premature scaling
Module 27
Embedding Innovation into the Organization
- Integrating innovation with strategy and planning
- Creating repeatable innovation processes
- Developing innovation capabilities
- Building leadership sponsorship
- Recognizing and rewarding useful innovation behavior
- Sharing innovation learning
- Removing policies that inhibit responsible experimentation
- Maintaining innovation beyond individual champions
Module 28
Measuring Innovation Performance
- Understanding why traditional measures may be insufficient
- Measuring learning in early stages
- Tracking experimentation velocity
- Monitoring assumptions validated or invalidated
- Measuring portfolio progress
- Tracking adoption and implementation
- Measuring customer and organizational value
- Using balanced innovation metrics
Module 29
Leading Innovation Through Change
- Connecting innovation with organizational change
- Understanding the human impact of new models
- Communicating the reason for change
- Building readiness
- Addressing capability gaps
- Managing transition concerns
- Reinforcing new behaviors and processes
- Sustaining leadership attention after launch
Module 30
Practical Breakthrough Innovation Workshop
- Selecting a significant organizational challenge
- Identifying customer or stakeholder insight
- Challenging current assumptions
- Reframing the opportunity
- Generating alternative concepts
- Selecting a promising concept
- Identifying critical assumptions
- Designing an initial experiment
- Defining evidence and next decisions
Module 31
Developing a Breakthrough Innovation Action Plan
- Assessing current innovation strengths and barriers
- Identifying priority opportunity areas
- Selecting leadership behaviors to strengthen
- Defining experimentation practices
- Identifying governance improvements
- Clarifying stakeholder and sponsorship needs
- Defining immediate and longer-term actions
- Creating a practical Breakthrough Innovation Leadership Action Plan
Registration is now open.
Morning and evening classes are available. CompuBase Training Center, Abu Dhabi.
