Innovative Teams: Education and Training

The ICCL provides several educational projects concerning “Leading teams for innovation”:

PhD-course: Leading diverse teams
In this course a small group of highly talented PhD-students and Master Students discuss the state-of-the-art literature on team diversity, team innovation, and team leadership. All students develop a research stream that will investigate an important issue on this area.

Bachelor thesis theme: Leading innovative teams
In this course small groups of bachelor students develop and conduct research in the areas of innovation, diversity, and team leadership. Students are required to conduct actual field research. For instance, several students worked with the ROI, a leadership development centre for leaders in the Dutch government. These students helped ROI to determine key processes (psychological empowerment) to develop for leaders to be able to stimulate creativity of their employees.

Masters Course: Managing Open Innovation
In 2009 we developed and executed this course together with Unilever. Guided by experienced faculty three groups of students investigated the crowd sourcing activities of Unilever and presented their findings and advice to senior management. Furthermore, because management was thoroughly impressed with the results, faculty and students have made plans with Unilever to build on these initial findings to help Unilever design and implement open innovation strategies.

Corporate Education at DSM
With DSM we are conducting research on cross functional R&D teams focusing on cooperation, communication, and management of these teams to maximize their creative output. We are developing specific training programs for DSM’s R&D team members and for R&D team leaders, give these training programs and evaluate their success.