Western’s IDEA Institute to host intensive course on innovation Sept. 14-18

Western Washington University’s IDEA Institute, in partnership with the Ohio-based Innovation Engineering Institute, will host a five-day intensive Innovation College from Sept. 14 to 18 on Western’s Bellingham campus.

Designed for professionals in all industries as well as entrepreneurs and students, the course focuses on how to enable innovation in any organization by everyone, every day. Participants will learn a systematic approach to innovate, from brainstorming to product development to problem-solving within an organization.

Through five days of hands-on labs and more than 100 pre-work digital classes, the course will introduce students to the principles of innovation engineering and how to increase the speed of innovation and decrease risk through systems thinking.

Students will practice the creation, communication, and commercialization of meaningfully unique ideas, including work with patents, marketing messages and data mining for economic, social and cultural trends.

“[Innovation engineering] is about making innovation accessible and enabling all people within organizations to use these skills— making innovation  not just in the realm of  organizational  gurus or  a few senior leaders of a company,” said Denny Organ, a Western instructor who teaches innovation engineering courses.

An industry-tested field of study developed by the Eureka! Ranch and the Innovation Engineering Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio, the innovation engineering movement consists of hundreds of practitioners in organizations globally and has curriculum offered in more than 20 universities in the U.S. and Canada.

For additional details regarding Innovation College at WWU, including registration information, or to receive a free consultation on how the program can make a positive impact on your organization, please visit www.wwu.edu/ee/conference/innovation.

Western’s IDEA Institute offers an entrepreneurship minor and is currently developing the Innovation Engineering series, a three-course university version of Innovation College. This fall, Western will offer the first course in the series, a 4-credit, quarter-long course titled “DSCI 397x: Innovation Engineering I: Create.” For more information on Western’s IDEA Institute, visit www.wwu.edu/idea.