Master class : Master Class Organizing for Innovation

Module Strategizing for Innovation

In this module, you’ll learn how to bring focus to your innovation activities by formulating a clear innovation mission and strategy in line with your company strategy. Building on strategic foresighting, a strong innovation mission and strategy can emerge that will enable the company to allocate the limited resources, efforts and time in a more efficient and effective way.

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Start date

08.12.2025

Training days

2 days

Location

Antwerp

Language

English

Price

Module: €2.250

Introduction Overview Learning Outcomes Alignment Top faculty Curriculum Practical info Faculty

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Building a strategic and focused innovation mission for sustainable growth

Today’s reality places enormous pressure on leaders. Macro-economic trends—such as major geopolitical crises and the rapid rise of technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI)—are putting organisations under strain while simultaneously creating opportunities for new directions. What works today may be obsolete tomorrow. Innovation is therefore not a luxury, but a necessity to survive and remain agile in a fast-evolving landscape.

Despite this existential pressure—and the fact that innovation ranks high on the agendas of CEOs and managers—there is a significant gap between intention and actual execution. A troubling statistic illustrates this clearly: 94% of executives worldwide are dissatisfied with their organisation’s innovation performance.

The root of this problem is often not a lack of ideas, but a lack of focus and structure. Executives struggle with fundamental questions: in which direction should we innovate, and how can we correctly assess the impact of trends and technologies?

This module, Strategizing for Innovation, provides the strategic lens needed to navigate this complexity. It helps you translate strategic directions into a focused innovation mission, ensuring that innovation activities are purposeful and aligned. By making strategic choices explicit and ensuring alignment with the overarching business strategy, you ensure that limited investments and resources are deployed efficiently.

In short, you build a coherent and adaptable approach that creates sustainable competitive advantage.

Module overview

This two-day module is designed to equip participants with a strategic lens to navigate the complexity of today’s business environment. You will learn how to use strategy to steer innovation within your organisation, ensuring that innovation efforts are focused and embedded in the overall organisational strategy. The module supports you in developing a focused innovation mission and strategy aligned with broader business objectives, leading to more efficient use of resources, time, and effort.

Day 1 focuses on the building blocks of a strategy-focused organisation. You explore the fundamental principles of strategic management, the underlying theory, and the reasons why leaders often struggle with strategy. The emphasis is on the core components of an effective strategy and how the strategy process can be structured. Central to this day is making strategy explicit—by structuring its content, testing the underlying logic, and building a strong strategic narrative. You will learn how an integrated strategy management system can translate vision into tangible outcomes, managing strategy as a continuous process rather than a one-off exercise.

Day 2 shifts the focus from strategy to innovation. The day begins by defining the fundamental aspects of innovation (What, Why, and How), followed by the critical step of translating strategic directions into a clear innovation mission and vision. Working in groups, participants design the innovation foundations of their own organisation and learn how to identify and align key strategic choices. The day concludes with a focus on the essential skill of successfully selling and pitching the innovation strategy within the organisation.

In short, the module teaches you how to seamlessly integrate innovation and strategy to create focused and measurable impact:

• Critically assess the organisation’s current strategic direction and diagnose strategic challenges.
• Understand how innovation acts as a critical lever for achieving strategic objectives and sustaining competitive advantage.
• Develop a clear, measurable innovation mission and a measurement framework (based on ROI and KPIs) fully aligned with the business strategy.
• Learn how to design strategic innovation portfolios to effectively prioritise and balance initiatives in line with strategic goals.
• Apply the principles of Strategic Foresight to anticipate trends and future scenarios and strengthen the innovation strategy.

Learning outcomes

After successfully completing the module “Strategizing for Innovation”, participants will be able to:

Understand and apply core strategy concepts
Describe and apply key strategic frameworks to analyse their organisational context and define a clear direction for the future.
Diagnose strategic challenges
Identify critical strategic challenges and opportunities within their organisations and industries.
Make strategy explicit
Define and map the underlying value-creation model (performance-generating model) for their organisation or team.
Align strategy and innovation
Explain how innovation serves as an essential lever for achieving strategic objectives and sustaining long-term competitive advantage.
Design strategic innovation portfolios and translate them into action
Develop high-level plans to prioritise and balance innovation initiatives in line with strategic goals, and formulate concrete next steps to operationalise the strategy within their teams or organisations.

Alignment with other modules and the masterclass

The Master Class Organizing for Innovation consists of five independent modules that together form a comprehensive toolkit for successfully embedding and organising innovation. The modules address the essential elements required to increase innovation success: strategizing, cultivating, leading, structuring, and collaborating.

The role of Module 2 in the overall journey:

Foundation
Module 2 lays the groundwork for the directional choices you make throughout the rest of the programme. You learn how to strategically anchor innovation and how to develop a clear, measurable innovation mission that is fully aligned with the overarching business strategy. Without strategy, innovation remains non-committal, leading to fragmented efforts and a low Return on Innovation (ROI). This module ensures you work with focus rather than trying to pursue everything at once.

Sequence
Module 2 follows Cultivating for Innovation (M1) and ensures that the creative mindset developed in M1 is given clear direction. The innovation objectives defined in M2 are then operationalised and led within teams in Leading for Innovation (M3). M2 also helps you strengthen the innovation strategy and anticipate future scenarios through Strategic Foresight. The strategic choices made in this module subsequently shape the processes and structures addressed in Structuring for Innovation (M4) and the external collaborations explored in Ecosystems for Innovation (M5).

The modular structure allows you to follow the full learning journey (ten days) or to select individual modules that best align with your immediate priorities and the needs of your organisation.

Top faculty

This module is led by a complementary duo of experts: Prof. Geert Scheipers and Prof. Dr. Robin De Cock. Together, they offer a sharp perspective on how organisations give direction to innovation—not as a standalone project, but as a strategic system.

Prof. Geert Scheipers

Geert Scheipers is Professor of Strategy and Leadership and serves, among other roles, as Programme Director of the Master Class in Business Strategy and Leadership. With more than 25 years of experience in strategic management and performance management, he combines academic expertise with deep hands-on experience in guiding organisations through the design and implementation of strategies in complex and rapidly changing environments. His expertise lies at the intersection of strategy, organisational optimisation, analytics, and digital transformation. Geert supports organisations in making strategic choices that are both widely supported and future-proof.

Prof. Dr. Robin De Cock

Robin De Cock is Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Academic Director of the Master in Sustainable Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich. He obtained his PhD from Ghent University and was previously a researcher at Imperial College London. He is an expert in technology entrepreneurship, business model innovation, and entrepreneurial team dynamics. Robin advises both start-ups and larger organisations on innovation strategy and brings extensive hands-on business experience through consulting assignments across various sectors. He is known for his energetic teaching style and for coaching leaders in scaling businesses and powerfully pitching ideas.

Role in the module

Together, this duo brings years of experience in strategic leadership and innovation execution to help you embed innovation sustainably within the business strategy. They guide you in defining strategic directions and translating them into measurable innovation activities.

Curriculum

Day 1: The building blocks of a strategy-focused organisation

Day 1, led by Prof. Geert Scheipers, builds a solid foundation for understanding strategy. You will learn how to diagnose strategic challenges and make strategy explicit.

The day starts with the fundamentals of strategic management: How do we define strategy, what is the theoretical foundation, and why do leaders so often struggle with it?

You then dive deeper into the core components of an effective strategy and explore how to best structure the strategic process—and who to involve along the way.

You make strategy explicit by learning how to structure its content, test its underlying logic, and build a strong strategic narrative. You will define and map the underlying performance-generating model of your organisation.

The day concludes with a focus on an integrated strategy management system, showing how to translate organisational vision into tangible results and how to manage strategy as a continuous process.

Day 2: When strategy meets innovation

Day 2, led by Prof. Dr. Robin De Cock, builds the bridge between strategic direction and the execution of focused innovation efforts.

You begin by defining the foundations of innovation (What, Why, How) to sharpen focus.

You learn how to translate strategic direction into a clear innovation mission and vision, ensuring that innovation acts as a lever to achieve strategic objectives.

Working in groups, you design the innovation foundations and mission of your own organisation.

An experienced guest speaker shares hands-on, real-world insights into how a large organisation such as Colruyt addresses strategic challenges and brings focus to its innovation activities.

You learn how to identify the key strategic choices that shape innovation and how to align these choices to create a coherent strategy.

Finally, the day focuses on the crucial step of selling and pitching your innovation strategy within the organisation. You gain the tools to develop a high-level plan to prioritise and balance innovation initiatives.

Practical info

Course Dates

The complete innovation program consists of 5 modules, each spanning 2 course days (from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM).

Module 1 - Cultivating for Innovation: March 2-3, 2026
Module 2 - Strategizing for Innovation: March 30-31, 2026
Module 3 - Leading for Innovation: May 7-8, 2026
Module 4 - Structuring for Innovation: May 28-29, 2026
Module 5 - Ecosystems for Innovation: June 22-23, 2026

Location

Campus Antwerp Management School

Boogkeers 5
BE-2000 Antwerp, Belgium

Price and Financial Benefits

Registration Fee

The registration fee for this module is €1,750 (excluding VAT). If you choose to enroll in the full masterclass Organizing for Innovation (5 modules), the registration fee is €6,550 (excluding VAT).

Financial Benefits

AMS alumni receive a 10% discount on the tuition fee, with a maximum amount of €2,500 (excl. VAT). [Click here for more info].
SME e-wallet: Flemish SMEs receive 20% to 30% subsidies from the Flemish Government.
A similar subsidy is available for SMEs based in Brussels.
Participants from Belgian public and social profit organizations may be eligible for financial support.

For more information, please contact the Learning & Development Advisor.