Creativity & Innovation Certificate
About the Creativity and Innovation Certificate
Because organizations must innovate to stay alive in today's highly competitive marketplace, organizations need employees who can channel their creativity and innovation toward organizational challenges and goals. This certificate program will first help you become re-acquainted with your own stores of creativity and innovation. Next, you are given a set of tools that allow you to leverage your creativity to identify and solve organizational problems.
Online, anytime and anywhere. The courses within this certificate can be accessed any time, day or night, allowing you to study at your own pace and in your own space. This flexibility enables you to create a timetable that works for you.
So go ahead and start your journey to personal and professional creativity today!
Program Content
Course Descriptions
Introduction to Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is an intellectual model for reasoning through issues to reach well-founded conclusions. It may be the single most valuable skill that one can bring to any job, profession, or life challenge. Being able to ask the right questions, critique an argument, and logically dissect issues that occur constantly in the workplace and our lives. This introductory-level course is designed to help learners define and identify critical thinking and reasoning skills and develop those skills.
Personal Creativity
This course examines how one can become a more creative person. By stimulating creativity through various techniques (mind-mapping, DO-IT, SCAMPER, right and left brain thinking), participants learn to tap into their personal creativity and apply it to organizational challenges.
Creativity in Teams and Organizations
Spurring creativity in teams can be very challenging but could also be the difference between a successful team and an unsuccessful one. This course looks at spurring creativity and innovation in teams and organizations. Drawing on the latest academic thinking, it outlines the key factors for creative teams. Further, the course focuses on tools and techniques designed to yield more productive thinking in collective settings. Participants learn about a number of targeted tools, including brainstorming, Discussion 66, Provocation, and others, to generate fresh thinking in smaller group settings and in their organizations.
Innovation in Teams and Organizations
Innovation can make or break an organization's ability to win and keep customers. This course looks at innovation in corporations and the public sector. It reviews the latest academic thinking on innovation, including Clay Christensen's seminal thinking on disruptive technology and the proper response to the disruption. Further, it explores internal responses to the need for creativity, including idea champions, idea incubators, new venture teams and skunk works, and moving from innovation to commercialization. This course also covers some of the more successful corporate innovators to illustrate the principles of effective innovation in large organizations.
Completion Requirements
To earn a Creativity and Innovation certificate, students are required to complete the content of each course in its entirety.
Admission Requirements
There are no prerequisites or online learning experience required.
Additional Requirements
Technology Requirements
In these courses, online learners will require a personal computer (PC) or laptop with a reliable internet connection to access coursework.
Program Cost
Students may take any number of the courses within this certificate as stand-alone courses.
Individual course prices are as follows:
Introduction to Critical Thinking $139
Creativity in Teams and Organizations $119
Innovation in Teams and Organizations $119
Personal Creativity $139
Funding for Continuing Education Courses
Students enrolled in continuing education programs may qualify for program-dependent funding opportunities, such as awards, scholarships, government funding and grants.