A look at ... udemy.com (and an innovation course)

Years ago, I interviewed Amir Elion for my series on 'we are the competent people'. Last month, Amir was so kind to send me a link to one of his latest endeavors: he created a course on Udemy.com. So here is a short look at both the platform and his course on innovation.

Udemy.com is a platform that allows people-who-have-something-to-teach to create online courses for people-who-want-to-learn-something. The focus of the 'something' is 'real world skills'. So you can create an 'instructor' account and created courses. The courses are a sequence of lessons that typically include video, maybe a quiz, extra resources to download, and comments/discussion. Instructors can decide whether they want to be paid for the courses or not, and then anyone can sign up and take the course. A lot of them are free, some are 20-something euro, some are 50+ euro, and occasionally even more expensive ones. I had never explored this online market for self-paced learning before, so I'm glad Amir send me an invite to his brand new course on innovation.

The interface of Udemy is slick, functional and easy to navigate. It has a typical course-mindset where you see completion status of the course and lectures you have watched. I did not check out the Android or iOS apps, but I'm sure they are slick and easy too. 

Now about the innovation course itself. Innovation is of course this big fat word that will solve all our problems, bring prosperity and mow the lawn for us. It is helpful to first start with an understanding of 'what's innovation to you?' Amir's course describes a generic process and toolset that is useful for many types of innovation, eg product and service innovation. You'll find many models on innovation out there. Some have 4 steps (eg FourSight), some have 6, and Amir uses a 5-step process with Strategy, Ideation, Screening, Elaboration and Execution. So the core message of this process is that innovation is not just about ideas (many people tend to narrow innovation down to ideas - most leaders I meet in my training say that ideas are the least of their challenges, they get good ideas coming to them all the time).  Innovation is getting new ideas into value - and that means serving a need in the market, diverging and converging on how to meet that need, fleshing out the idea and tweaking it to perfection, and implementing it. Amir bring a lot of very insightful examples to the mix and he also covers a lot of tools with downloadable work sheets. That's what makes this course practical. As most courses on innovation, the majority of the 'meat' of the course goes into tools around brainstorming ideas and selecting the best ideas and less about the elaboration or execution of them. But what I found very refreshing is that in the last part of the course Amir goes into advertising and selling your innovative solution as part of the implementation phase. That is a fresh angle that makes this course a bit different from similar courses (at least to me) and that can actually make a big difference. He charges 11 euro for Innovate - a practical product & service innovation workshop. 

If I ever have tons of time I might make a course myself, but for now I'm still busy to learn how to make an app...