How established companies adapt, innovate, and navigate disruption
Innovation in mature companies requires deliberate strategy, cultural alignment, and a clear-eyed understanding of the forces reshaping industries. This course equips students with frameworks to assess how large public companies approach innovation—and to become effective change agents within them.
Corporate Innovation (Northwestern ENTREP 395) is a course I co-teach with Sailesh Chutani at Northwestern University’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Now entering its third year, the course explores how established firms adapt to change, create new value, and navigate the disruptive forces reshaping the corporate landscape.
Sailesh and I bring decades of combined experience in corporate innovation to the classroom. He held leadership roles at Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Microsoft, and Logitech, where he served as CTO and chief innovation catalyst. My own career includes twenty years initiating new businesses at Microsoft, leading vehicle software development at Ford, and running a seed-stage venture fund. We designed this course because we saw a gap: students interested in entrepreneurship often end up working inside large organizations, and they need a practical framework for understanding how innovation actually happens—and stalls—within those environments.
The course is built around a layered analytical framework that students apply throughout the quarter.
We begin with the fundamentals: what is a modern public corporation? Students explore the history and structure of the corporate form, how companies report to stakeholders through SEC filings and 10-K analysis, and how governance structures shape strategic decisions. This grounds everything that follows.
From there, we introduce Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation framework alongside our own model of the elements that enable or inhibit corporate innovation. Students learn to identify the forces—internal and external—that determine whether a company can respond effectively to disruption.
We layer on additional analytical tools throughout the course. Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas gives students a structured way to deconstruct how companies create, deliver, and capture value. Michael Porter’s Five Forces analysis provides a lens for understanding competitive dynamics and industry structure. And we spend significant time on corporate culture—how it can accelerate innovation when aligned with strategy, and how it can become the biggest barrier when it isn’t.
For 2026, we’re restructuring the course around two major disruptions as case studies for the analytical frameworks.
In the first half, student teams will conduct a retrospective analysis of the smartphone disruption. Each team will be assigned a company that was significantly affected—Nokia, Motorola, Google, Apple, Qualcomm, AT&T, or Uber—and will analyze how that company navigated (or failed to navigate) the mobile revolution roughly from 2004 to 2012. They’ll apply the full toolkit: Christensen’s framework, business model analysis, competitive positioning, ecosystem dynamics, and corporate culture. Guest speakers who lived through this era, including Jim Wicks from Motorola and perspectives from both Sailesh and me on how Microsoft saw it unfold, will bring the case studies to life.
In the second half, teams will turn their attention to a disruption in progress: artificial intelligence. Working with companies like NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others at the center of the AI transformation, students will apply the same frameworks to assess corporate innovation strategies in real time. This is inherently messier and more uncertain than the retrospective analysis—which is exactly the point. Students learn to apply structured thinking to situations where the outcome is still unfolding.
The course runs over ten weeks during the spring quarter, meeting twice weekly. It combines case studies (including the Logitech turnaround case and Apple’s organizational approach to innovation), lectures, guest speakers from industry, and two major team-based company assessments. Guest speakers have included Xbox founding team members, former Google X leaders, and executives from companies like Harley-Davidson and Docusign.
Students are evaluated on class participation, two team company assessments, and reflections on case studies and readings. The emphasis is on applied analysis—students don’t just learn the frameworks, they use them to produce substantive assessments of real companies facing real strategic challenges.
The course is designed for Northwestern undergraduates across schools who are interested in innovation, strategy, and how large organizations change. Whether students plan to join a startup, a consulting firm, or a Fortune 500 company, the frameworks and analytical skills translate directly to understanding the environments they’ll work in.
No materials yet for this course. Check back soon!