Leading Through Innovation

The path to innovative leadership is known as Berkeley Innovative Leader Development (BILD). BILD is our strategy for developing innovative leaders—through culture, specific capabilities, and experiential learning.

The process starts with the careful selection of Berkeley MBA students, who have demonstrated leadership and exemplify the school's defining principles. Then in MBA Orientation, you begin an exploration of the BILD approach.

The innovative leadership archetype is based on a set of specific competencies—such as problem framing and experimentation—that together will give you the knowledge to be successful in the 21st century.

Core Courses Emphasize Leadership Capabilities

In addition to teaching you the essential knowledge of business fundamentals, the curriculum's core courses go beyond the basics to highlight concepts that contribute to the capabilities of the innovative leader. For example, the Leading People and Leadership Communications courses give you additional motivational skills, such as influencing others without having direct authority over them.

You also learn how to set direction as a leader in your strategy course, and how to manage complex projects and enterprises in your operations course. Finally, you are taught the lessons of leading responsibly through your coursework, which is reinforced by the school's prevailing culture.

Required Experiential Learning Course

You also take a required experiential learning course that gives you practice in solving real-world business problems and emphasizes innovative leader capabilities. The list of experiential programs ranges from applied innovation projects with major firms to global consulting opportunities.

A prerequisite to the experiential course is Problem Finding, Problem Solving, a new course that teaches you several different modes of thinking in order to find, frame, and solve difficult problems that are characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Another module provides you with skill development and individual and group coaching on how to be an effective leader of a high performance team.

Electives and Beyond

A series of electives give you the option of studying various aspects of innovative leadership in greater depth, including cutting-edge courses such as Open Innovation and Managing the New Product Development Process.

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First-Person

Don Moore

Associate Professor

"Leadership is, of course, what most MBAs want to learn. They want to have an influence and advance in an organization."