Jam today - and more, and juicier jam tomorrow. Innovation promises sweet rewards but there is no easy-to-follow recipe for developing market-leading products or services that guarantee big profits. As a result, innovation keeps more and more chief executives awake at night. With hundreds of degree courses on innovation management on offer, do well-schooled graduates have any useful answers?

“Innovation, by its very nature, is creative and the products of innovation are serendipitous,” says Julian Birkinshaw, a professor of strategic and international management and co-founder of the Management Innovation Lab (MLab) at London Business School. But you can teach students how to develop commercially the ideas that come from the “very fuzzy creative front end” of innovation, he says. And they are well-placed to take a fresh look at the way in which business is done.

“One of the missions at the MLab is to help our students to challenge basic assumptions about why we do the things that we do,” Professor Birkinshaw says. “With a view that they can be more innovative, not in terms of creating new products and services, but about the processes and systems and the way that we work in companies.”

Innovation management has been studied for some 25 years, says Professor David Gann, who holds the chair in technology and innovation management at Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. Tanaka graduates offer valuable skills to employers looking to get to grips with the business of innovation.

Good bosses can turn on the style

Can the essence of leadership be distilled to just six styles?

Background

• Leaders who put onus on the led

• Affiliation feels good if it works

• A new take on the big picture

• The direct route is not always best

Related Internet Links

• How to make the most of working life

• Jobs search

• Snakes & Ladders

“They will go into a business and be able to show that they understand that this is a process, not a flash of lightning, and that you can manage it,” Professor Gann says. “A smart student will say that they can manage that investment and get better returns from it by understanding these processes and being able to organise them in a smart, modern way.”

A new MA in innovation management at Central St Martins College of Art and Design is to focus on recognising trends and understanding consumers to identify new opportunities, Simon Bolton, the course director says.

“If you look at wearing a pair of shoes - if that is the issue [for example] - if you focus on that you don't understand the broader context in which the shoe is bought and the person lives,” he says. “So we help companies to broaden their outlook [as] to how they look at an issue.”

The course aims to develop leaders with very specific core skills combined with design-thinking. As Bolton says,designers are expert at coming up with hybrid solutions to any given problem and companies can benefit from this way of thinking. “What this does is reduce risk because you are not [following] a single-shot innovation strategy.”

Out in the real world, GE is not alone in saying that innovation is fundamental to its organic growth. GE Healthcare launched an innovation programme - called Imagination Breakthroughs - to encourage risk-taking and develop approved projects, says Jean-Michel Cosséry, its vice-president for marketing.

It's not about innovation for its own sake, he says. “Everything starts with the definition of the customer needs, then trying to help people to arrive at new solutions to meet this customer need. It is not academic innovation.”

In addition to having about 3,000 staff working on technical R&D, GE also has innovation and marketing on the curriculum at its learning centre while it recruits MBA graduates with three to five years' sales or marketing experience to its leadership programme.

Cosséry says that it is important to bring new blood, such as MBAs, into GE to encourage innovation, but that existing staff are also expected to have innovation in their DNA. “It's the mix that is so important.”

Times Recommends

• Inspirational leadership
• How to get a new job
• The reluctant CEO