Creativity is narcissistic, it adores itself, and disregards long term objectives; it even dismisses its own past ideas. The more creative we are, the more we need guardrails to ensure that our creativity translates to innovation productivity.

This is what this course is all about. It starts with order, documentation, inter-team communication, team-sponsors communication, and stake-holders wide communication. Then: formalities, security, intellectual property management. It continues into the step most of us dread, and few understand its power: estimating the cost, and projecting the schedule from the present state to successful achievement of the stated R&D goal. We focus on how to come up with credible estimated figures. And most importantly, we learn a surprising principle of innovation: it's goal is to increase the credibility of the estimate of the effort needed to reach the strategic objective of our innovation project. We will learn that this bizarre statement of the operational goal is well substantiated. Beyond that we define the "Innovation Turing Machine" -- loosely inspired by the Turing machine that is the generic version of all common computers. The Innovation Turing machine is an iterative procedural sequence that guides our creativity towards its innovative target states: a sequence of 'abstraction', 'extension' and 'breakdown'. In summary we develop an innovation platform that boosts our innovation efficiency, and harnesses our creativity towards our innovative objectives.