The Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University is establishing a new center for excellence, which will aim to encourage innovation both within and outside of business.
The new Center of Innovation Excellence will be led by the Executive Director and Associate Professor of management and entrepreneurship, Steve Olson. Olson comes to Kennesaw State University from his most recent position running the Center for Ethics and Corporate Responsibility at Georgia State University.
Olson’s goal in building the center is to construct the “Juilliard” of innovation- that is, bringing together masters of the field with top student talent. He maintains a number of goals for the center, including: developing a multi-disciplinary course on innovation, discovering ways to include non-business students in business classes through core-cirriculum offerings, create tools to support both business and student innovation, build business partnerships and attract students from other majors.
According to Olson, the center will aim to not just encourage new business ideas, but use innovation to strengthen and increase the existing value of a business. “A business can’t sustain profitability without innovating well. We have to ask, how do we create lasting value that is so unique that there’s nothing else to like it in terms of value?”
Olson’s aim in creating such a multi-disciplinary center is to utilize the strengths of students from various disciplines. In addition to using these strengths to involve diverse subject areas, the center will aim to develop new products and business ideas. Olson hopes also to focus on ethics and their evolution alongside developments in business. “This new center will be looking at innovation writ large,” he said. “We’ll start with business innovation and that will naturally transition to social innovation and even innovation in ethics.”