Hello, my name is Geoff Love. I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois. And I'll be the Instructor in our class. Now, I've taught innovation in our Master's and Technology Management Program for about the past 10 years, and I was also an entrepreneur many years ago. I built a business around software that I wrote that manages the operations of dental offices and we went national and went through all kinds of challenges and excitement. And, innovation is something that I've been around for a long time and you won't be surprised to find that I think that managing innovation is one of the most interesting topics and challenges to learn about. So, I'm very much looking forward to our course and I want to give you a short introduction to the course before you start working through the material. So, the course title is Strategic Innovation: Managing Innovation Initiatives. Now, many of you will have completed the sister course on strategic innovation. That course was focused on how new products and ideas connected with the marketplace and consumers over time. So took a strategic perspective and examined how, for example, companies could change the rules of the game in competitive marketplaces by altering the basis of competition or creating new business models. So that's the strategic side. But here, this course is different. It's going to focus on management of innovation, that is actually getting things done. You might think of this as execution of our strategic intent in an innovation context. Now, from a conceptual perspective, managing innovation is interesting because much research has found that it requires different approaches than does management of established businesses. Your own experience may well confirm this. What's new simply behaves differently than what has become accepted over time, whether it's a market or a technology or in people's heads or an organization. What is new brings with it uncertainty and ambiguity that introduce important challenges into management decisions and organizational processes. So, these issues will be written large in our course. Now, more specifically, we're going to start by examining how to successfully implement innovation initiatives within established firms and alongside established businesses. This is our basic model. It turns out this is quite challenging but there are some powerful ideas we can bring to bear. In the second module, we're going to consider the particular challenges of disruptive technologies. How firms can implement those effectively. By the time we reach the third module, we're going to be delving down into the level of teams, challenges of leading product development teams and then finally, the fourth module, we're going to do two things. We're going to consider how planning and evaluation, in particular, can be effective in innovation situations and then we're going to take a brief look at how to manage innovation when the effort spans organizational boundaries as with alliances, joint ventures, and virtual firms are open to innovation. So, without further ado, I invite you to start in on the course materials. Please check the syllabus on website to make sure that you keep up with the assignments as necessary as well.