Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate

Innovation isn’t guesswork or an isolated spark of creative genius — it’s a discipline that can be learned, practiced, and mastered. The Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate is Wharton Online’s end-to-end innovation credential, built across three self-paced courses that take you from fundamentals to execution. You’ll gain research-based frameworks and hands-on tools to lead innovation with clarity and confidence — applying them to products, services, processes, and organizational challenges of every kind.

Guided by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, globally recognized scholars, consultants, and entrepreneurs, you will move step by step from understanding the fundamentals of innovation, to running large-scale processes that surface high-potential ideas, to applying design thinking to create and test compelling solutions. Along the way, you will learn to balance creativity with rigor, leverage AI to accelerate ideation, and integrate innovation into your organization’s culture.

Self-paced and delivered entirely online, each course in the certificate includes three to five in-depth modules (four to six hours each). You’ll learn through a blend of video lectures, applied activities, and proven frameworks, with every individual course culminating in its own digital completion badge.

Guided by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich — co-authors of Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities — you’ll gain direct access to the scholars who pioneered structured approaches to breakthrough ideas. Recognized worldwide for both research and consulting, they bring rigorous scholarship and real-world expertise to help you build a practical roadmap you can apply immediately.

The Innovation Strategy and Design Thinking Certificate is designed for professionals across industries who want to drive meaningful impact through innovation. Ideal participants include:

Innovation belongs to everyone. This certificate turns potential into results.

To further leverage the value and impact of this program, we encourage companies to send cross-functional teams of executives to Wharton. We offer group-enrollment benefits to companies sending four or more participants.