Innovation is a key driver of organizational growth and long-term success. By prioritizing it, businesses can strengthen their competitive advantage and improve their processes and culture.
As organizations navigate rapid advances in artificial intelligence and digital technologies, innovation has become more important than ever. Companies across industries are rethinking how they create value, serve customers, and adapt to evolving market demands—inspiring new growth opportunities.
Yet, successful innovation requires more than generating new ideas. It demands a clear understanding of the problems being solved.
“Identifying frustrations is not enough," says Harvard Business School Professor Willy Shih in the online course Disruptive Strategy. "Innovators have to hold back from jumping straight to product assumptions until the job is clearly defined and validated. Otherwise, it’s easy to build a product that only partially addresses the problem—or solves a different one altogether.”
To position your organization for long-term success, it’s crucial to foster innovation across departments and at all levels. One effective method is innovation training.
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What Is Innovation Training?
Innovation training is a program or course that equips learners to understand and leverage innovation theories, frameworks, and techniques. The scope and content of innovation training can vary depending on the institution.
One example of innovation training is the online course Disruptive Strategy, created by former HBS Professor Clayton Christensen and now taught by Shih. In the course, participants learn how to align resources and processes to develop an innovative culture, assess new opportunities and potential threats, and harness disruption to position their organizations for growth.
Why Innovation Training Is Important
Innovation training is important because it can strengthen strategic thinking, improve team performance, and help organizations reach their potential. Without a focus on innovation, your organization could hinder its ability to compete with emerging disruptive technologies.
A report by PWC found that CEOs cite significant retraining and upskilling as a top priority for their organizations, with 55 percent noting that a lack of skills holds them back from innovating effectively.
If you want to help your organization avoid this pitfall, here are four ways innovation training can help transform your organization.
Innovation Training Benefits
1. It Enables Your Organization to Fulfill Customer Jobs to Be Done
One of innovation training's primary benefits is that it can help you and your colleagues better understand and serve customers’ needs.
In Disruptive Strategy, participants use Christensen’s jobs to be done (JTBD) theory to explore those needs and examine why customers choose certain offerings over others. The theory asserts that rather than buying products and services, customers hire them to perform a specific job.
One real-world example of a service that satisfies a job to be done is PayPal, which serves the needs of customers who want an easy way to submit payments online. While other options can fulfill this job, PayPal’s large merchant network, reputation for security, and convenient features make it a top choice for consumers.
By engaging in innovation training, you can help your organization identify the jobs that customers hire its products and services to fulfill. Through interviewing and other methods, you can improve your company’s offerings to better serve users’ needs.
2. It Equips Your Organization to Harness Disruption
A key advantage of focusing on customer jobs to be done is that it prepares your organization to capitalize on disruption rather than submit to it.
According to an Accenture report, over 60 percent of companies across 20 industries have experienced disruption, and more than 40 percent are highly susceptible to it in the future.
“The way you defend yourself against disruption and commoditization is to organize around a job to be done,” Christensen says in Disruptive Strategy. “Focusing around a job to be done causes you to create processes and integrated ways that your competitors find hard to copy.”
Using lessons and techniques gleaned from innovation training, you can help your organization craft a strategy that takes different customer needs and jobs into account, ensuring it’s well-positioned to respond to new opportunities and potential threats as they arise.
“If you frame the business you're in as delivering something that does the job better over time, it will open up opportunities to use new technologies as they emerge,” Christensen says in Disruptive Strategy. “What your business is about is doing the job better and better, and that clarity doesn't diminish over time because of the stability of the jobs to be done.”
3. It Drives Organizational Growth and Performance
Beyond influencing strategy, innovation training can positively impact your organization’s performance and growth.
Microsoft Data shows that companies with innovative cultures where new ideas are embraced and supported are twice as likely to experience double-digit growth, compared to those with less of an innovation focus.
Innovation can also drive financial performance. Research by McKinsey indicates that companies adept at five or more "innovation essentials"—such as “aspire,” “discover,” and “mobilize”—experience greater financial returns than less innovative organizations.
4. It Boosts Employee Engagement and Retention
Innovation training can increase employee engagement and retention.
According to additional Microsoft findings, 86 percent of employees at innovative organizations plan to stay in their jobs, compared to 57 percent who work for companies with lower levels of innovation.
In a Harvard Business Review article, executives from the pharmaceutical and life science company Bayer describe how innovation training and initiatives enabled their organization to transform.
As part of the company’s innovation efforts, it created a network of volunteer ambassadors and coaches who, through training and workshops, aimed to connect and inspire employees to engage in innovation.
The initiative led to a network of ambassadors and coaches across 70 countries—80 percent of whom were actively engaged in their innovation work, even though it was outside the scope of their official roles—and more than 5,000 people participated in innovation webinars and training events.
This example demonstrates the profound impact innovation training can have: Not only can it foster a commitment to innovation throughout your organization, but inform how it mobilizes and aligns its resources.
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Improving Your Innovation Skills Through Training
Innovation training is a worthwhile pursuit that can equip your organization with the skills to thrive as its industry evolves. While there’s a range of resources you can use to learn about innovation on your own time, many professionals opt for a more structured approach, such as an online course.
For Robbee Minicola, a senior director at Microsoft and former HBS Online participant, the knowledge and techniques she acquired in Disruptive Strategy helped her be more impactful in her role and drive innovation within her company.
“Within five days of finishing the course, I had a plan of action for a major part of our business and presented it to our corporate executive,” Minicola says. “It applied the jobs to be done theory and caused us to rethink our strategy to get the customer to ‘hire’ us over the competition.”
Do you want to harness the power of disruptive innovation to craft winning strategies? Explore our online course Disruptive Strategy—one of our strategy and entrepreneurship and innovation courses—and download our free strategy formulation e-book to learn how to align what your organization says with what it actually does.
This post was updated on May 29, 2026. It was originally published on September 17, 2020.