Curriculum & Courses

3 points total (1 point per intensive)

Scheduled during the first, eighth, and thirteenth months of the program, intensive study brings students together in New York City for an intensive series of lectures, seminars, workshops, career advisement sessions, and networking events facilitated by Columbia faculty, administrators, and industry professionals. Students are required to attend and actively participate in all practicum events.

Knowledge-driven organizations increasingly dominate the economy. What are their attributes? How do they find and leverage mission-critical knowledge? What vision and strategy guides their development? This course tackles these questions to help students understand how to lead their own organizations on the journey to become knowledge-driven.

What are the processes and practices that help us develop, retain, and share knowledge effectively to make our knowledge-driven organization a reality? How do we build smart knowledge stocks and enable knowledge flows? And, what are the information governance guidelines that allow us to do so responsibly? What are the privacy, security, and other legal implications of these knowledge stocks and flows? In this course we explore answers to these questions from the perspective of a leader of a knowledge-driven organization.

How do organizations leverage both their own data and external information to transform their business? Emphasizing the need to continually innovate and understand customers, this course explores the vital role of business analytics and big data. It also addresses the critical skills and capabilities an organization needs for success, including leadership, culture, methods and tools for becoming data driven, while also balancing human judgment. Lectures, readings, cases, and guest speakers consider the impact and challenges of gathering, storing, analyzing and providing access to insights to facilitate effective decision making. Students use a business analytics maturity model to frame and define the right investments to grow their organization’s ability to compete on analytics.

In a world of increasing complexity, the age of the lone genius is over. Now work happens in teams. Those teams may be globally distributed, involving people with a variety of expertise, work styles, and culture. Research shows that diverse, highly credentialed teams create some collaboration challenges. At a larger scale, organizations are now collaborating with other organizations, government agencies, volunteers groups, and even competitors in shared pursuit of even more ambitious mission and strategy. In this course, we look at the components of healthy collaboration and what it takes to design and lead a healthy collaboration, regardless of its size.

Exponential growth of information and data—combined with software that can understand and learn from analytic experience—provides entrepreneurs with tremendous opportunities to bring innovative customer-focused solutions to market. While there are no direct paths to bring a new product idea to market, there are easily identifiable milestones that can guide the way from idea generation to product profitability. This course will explore the process of early stage development of knowledge-driven, data-intensive digital products like Pandora, Netflix, Watson and Trip Advisor. The goal is to create a hands-on entrepreneurial experience at its most elemental and visceral level—ideation, brainstorming, interacting with customers, building a founding team, developing a business model, managing risk, investigating competitors, and pitching the business to potential investors, and creating an interactive mobile app prototype (a design proof of concept for your business idea) through an iterative user-centered design process. Students will be exposed to all the pressures and demands of real world start-ups by participating on teams tasked with creating deliverables required to launch a new business. The user experience skills and methods that are taught in this class are in demand by employers and startups across nearly every industry, and reflect the latest best practices used to create today’s most widely used and award-winning digital products.

3 points total (1 point per intensive)

Scheduled during the first, eighth, and thirteenth months of the program, intensive study brings students together in New York City for an intensive series of lectures, seminars, workshops, career advisement sessions, and networking events facilitated by Columbia faculty, administrators, and industry professionals. Students are required to attend and actively participate in all practicum events.

How do organizational leaders invest in digital technologies and capabilities to catalyze digital transformation? Moreover, how do corporations and institutions create an effective portfolio of digital investments that are aligned — continuously over time — with the organization’s mission and strategy? This course provides an introduction to digital transformation, and the modern (digital) “place” of work, such as intranets, search appliances, analytic dashboards, enterprise social media, mixed reality, and content management. Feeding the digital workplace are “sources of record,” including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IoT sensors, and digital marketing. Finally, we look at likely future scenarios for work and how organizations can prepare for digital transformation and beyond.

Drawing on examples from a variety of organizations, this course will focus directly on strategies for building a successful knowledge service or product for organizations or institutions. Topics will include talking to management about products and knowledge services, performing process improvement, building sustainable stakeholder relationships, crafting knowledge services that improve the top and bottom lines, communicating knowledge services, measuring success, building communities of practice, and creating a reflective practitioner environment through the use of stories. Students will get hands-on experience diagnosing and proposing knowledge strategies that help their organization to improve its effectiveness and competitiveness

How do organizational leaders invest in digital technologies and capabilities to catalyze digital transformation? Moreover, how do corporations and institutions create an effective portfolio of digital investments that are aligned — continuously over time — with the organization’s mission and strategy? This course provides an introduction to digital transformation, and the modern (digital) “place” of work, such as intranets, search appliances, analytic dashboards, enterprise social media, mixed reality, and content management. Feeding the digital workplace are “sources of record,” including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), HR systems, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IoT sensors, and digital marketing. Finally, we look at likely future scenarios for work and how organizations can prepare for digital transformation and beyond.

The IKNS Capstone project is the culmination of the students’ immersion in this executive-level program, and an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the cross-disciplinary curriculum. Working individually and in small teams, students do a consulting project for an organization seeking to improve its decision-making and execution using the core competencies taught in this program. Clients benefit from applied and scholarly research, analysis, and insight from students, who, guided by faculty, bring considerable professional and academic credentials. Students benefit from applying their learning in an environment that is at the same time realistic and supported by IKNS faculty and sponsors, and from getting exposure to a new industry, function, and network of practitioners. Capstone projects showcase IKNS student learning, and can be conducted virtually (outside of New York, and/or in New York with remote students). Industry and nonprofit “sponsors” are curious, motivated, well-networked professionals who can help the students bring to light the insights and vision of their organization. Student projects might include:

• Improving knowledge-sharing patterns and incentives
• Designing a business analytics competency for decision-making
• Improving or introducing knowledge networks or communities
• Improving or introducing collaboration processes
• Redefining information architectures, taxonomies and tagging for maximum engagement
• Expanding the repertoire of tacit knowledge sharing approaches
• Introducing knowledge-based products as incremental revenue streams
• Defining a knowledge and information governance model, and expanding the capacity to act
• Defining a KM vision from the ground up, with roadmap, program, and technology evolution

The Capstone Project Seminar involves introductions to research methods, team-collaboration, consulting basics, and project management. Student work entails secondary research, expert or employee interviews, model development joint design of processes, operations, and technology; analysis and improvements to content or technology, new product or practice planning, and client training and presentations. Students strive for not just lofty strategies, but practical action.

3 points total (1 point per intensive)

Scheduled during the first, eighth, and thirteenth months of the program, intensive study brings students together in New York City for an intensive series of lectures, seminars, workshops, career advisement sessions, and networking events facilitated by Columbia faculty, administrators, and industry professionals. Students are required to attend and actively participate in all practicum events.

This course is offered in block week format, typically held in January.

The economy of the world is changing. The goal of this course is to understand the drivers of the change, study organization exemplars innovating to harness these drivers for advantage, and provide the tools and strategies for staying competitive and successful. We will explore the changing nature of work, provide the means for better understanding what is occurring, and develop strategies for successfully navigating this new world.

This course will start by noticing how platforms, robotics, AI, automation, data, digitization, and the speed of technology has changed work. We will then connect technology innovation with the ultimate advantage of people and the adaptive and value-centered capabilities of leaders that are taking these advantages to the next level of delivering notable value.

This will lead to learning from the forward leaning “See’ers and Do’ers” from teams and organizations that are harnessing successes in three vital areas of “intangibles” — leadership, knowledge, culture — the pillars necessary for success in the many potential futures of work organizations are facing. The course focus will be on offering students an understanding of the critical capabilities necessary for success, and providing skills that can be applied to successfully navigating the future of work for themselves, their team, and their own organization.

Our core question is, how to start, build, and sustain capabilities for successfully navigating the future of work? The course will answer this question by looking to current leaders and success organizations who are demonstrably leading the way. This will be combined with research that validates a set of core principles. Our learning bias is based on action and doing. Therefore, the course will require students to engage in reflection, discussion, activities, and assignments aimed at personal unlearning and learning.

Invited Speakers

• Alicia Aitken, Executive Investment Management, ANZ Australia 
• Alison Bakken, SVP, Thomson Reuters 
• David Dabscheck, GIANT Innovation 
• Stephane Kasriel, CEO, Upwork 
• Navy Tactical Advancements for the Next Generation (TANG) Design Team 
• Greg Robinson, NASA, Program Director, James Webb Space Telescope 
• Barry O’Reilly, CEO, Unlearn, Best selling author 
• Alan Richter, QED, Ethical Standards and Decent Work 
• Lt. Gen, Sattler, Chair – US Naval Academy Center for Ethical Leadership 
• Ben Williams, COO Exyn, Entrepreneur in Residence, UPenn

As the pace of technological change accelerates, and market disruptors lurk around the corner, organizations find that traditional hierarchies create a huge disadvantage. Decision-making is often layered and ponderous, insular cultures block new ideas, and information moves inefficiently. Increasingly, managers find that to compete they need novel operating models. Organizations need to readily access resources and markets. At the same time, they need diverse intelligence, large multidisciplinary data sets, and novel product ideas. The answer lies in the network, an organizational construct that involves people engaging across boundaries, organizations, and/or geographies. For-profit and nonprofit organizations, alike, are embracing networks to share insights and data, act as a voting block, serve customers, and innovate. The ideas of “open” and “collective” are no longer seen as a rarified university experiment. Now, these present a viable means for a growing number of purposes: get to market faster, thwart climate change, clean the oceans, and find cures to intractable diseases. 

“Networked Work” presents the structure, impacts, and practical work of networks. There are many different forms of networks, varying in size, shape, and purpose. Yet there are some common practices and behavior models that trace their origins back to the science of the human brain and human systems. We will use the Knowledge Network Effectiveness Framework and other scholarly research, along with practical cases, to study different network forms: communities of practice, knowledge-networks, crowds, open-source, open data, and open innovation. Students will envision, diagnose and design networks for “cooperative advantage.”

IKNS and other SPS students will find that the course aligns with the future of work, in which operations and innovation come increasingly from parties outside the organization or department. Work is more networked, collaborative, and integrative. This course relates to three main thrusts of the IKNS Program

• Digital transformation

• Future of work

• Leading collaboration

Project management has been important to many types of missions, projects, and activities for many years; however, it has been especially critical to the success of large complex projects across decades and centuries.  Large complex projects span the globe across all industries and sectors. They also span concepts, product design, development, manufacturing, operations, and logistics, etc. Products may include hardware, software, services, product support, systems, and systems of systems, etc.

The primary focus of this course will be around project leadership as projects are planned and executed (project management).  The course will start by recognizing the need and benefits of project management for large complex global projects, explore characteristics of project managers, and study the commonality and differences in types of projects.  The course will continue with understanding the essential capabilities of project management, and analyze the variations in project lifecycles. The course will address managing risk throughout the project lifecycle, controls, and performance measurement, and maximizing the use of knowledge.  Lastly, the course will visualize the future of projects and project management structure and core capabilities.

Our fundamental goal is to better prepare leaders for large complex global projects.  This will be gained via readings; real-world case studies; and study, research, analysis, and exploration by the students.  Therefore, the course will require students to engage in reflection, discussion, activities, and assignments aimed at personal unlearning and learning.  The assignment and class discussions will be quite provocative to drive maximum learning.

Students enrolled in this course have elected to complete an Independent Study of significant academic merit. This course allows you, along with the instructor, to develop a research project and final presentation.

The student is expected to complete rigorous academic and industry research on a topic of their choice approved by the instructor. Once the student has completed their research, the student is responsible for creating a deliverable of academic merit.

The opportunity to engage in an Independent Study is limited to a select number of students in good academic standing and demonstrating keen interest. Please complete the required questionnaire as application for consideration for admittance into the Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Program’s Independent Study course.