Graduate Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership
Lead the Digital Transformation
Does your current business model enable your organization to compete successfully in the global digital economy? Do you have managers and leaders who can fully embrace the digital era's new possibilities?
The Graduate Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership program prepares you to disrupt the digital technology wave and leverage its full potential. It prepares you to become an ambassador for incorporating new technologies into your organization’s business model and leveraging their potential value for tangible business benefits.
The program equips senior decision-makers with the skills and competencies needed to build a more proactive digital strategy to utilize, develop, and commercialize digital technologies and data, and discover new ways to create value. You will combine your strengths in management with insights from technology to understand how digital capabilities at the organizational level enable and call for new strategic priorities. You will also learn what organizational structures, practices, and cultures support strategy execution and gain the knowledge required to analyze what capabilities you need to stay competitive in the future.
The Graduate Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership program allows you to dive deep into the latest technologies through real-life business applications and company cases. You will better understand the practice, opportunities, and implications of using the technologies transforming your business environment.
In addition to four live modules taught by Aalto faculty, you will have the opportunity to take Stanford Online’s course Building an AI-Enabled Organization, where you will learn from Stanford University instructors and gain access to the latest knowledge and practical real-life cases.
During the program, you will develop a Digital Transformation Plan that balances your core business operations with new opportunities for competitive advantage. You can focus on the technology or digital strategy perspective based on your preference and current need.
The Graduate Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership program is worth 18 ECTS credits, which can be transferred to the Aalto EMBA or Aalto MBA program.
Combine your strengths in management with insights from technology. Take a deep dive into innovation and business strategy.
Take Stanford Online’s course Building an AI-Enabled Organization and learn how leading professionals are utilizing AI to create superior customer experiences and increase operational efficiency.
Develop a Digital Transformation Plan that balances your core business operations with new opportunities for competitive advantage.
Benefits
The program will challenge and reward you as our world-class experts help you cut through the noise of digitalization and technology and focus on what really matters for your business. It covers the latest trends in technology, like Generative AI and its possibilities. Also, the program provides you with practical tools and methods for the agile implementation of new skills and knowledge at work. It will help you challenge your strategic thinking and gain a comprehensive overview of the latest theory, technologies, and business applications.
For
The program is for business leaders, senior executives, and decision-makers responsible for leveraging the possibilities created by digitalization within their companies.
We recommend the program for core strategy team members, business development managers, and digital transformation leaders.
Contents and Schedule
The program incorporates face-to-face sessions as well as individual assignments and project work. Participants will have the opportunity to deepen their knowledge on the program themes through facilitated workshops, interactive faculty lectures and company cases. A digital learning environment will be used to support the learning experience.
During the program, you will develop a Digital Transformation Plan that balances your core business operations with new opportunities for competitive advantage. Based on your preference and current need, you can focus either on technology portfolio management or digital strategy development in your plan. Our expert faculty tutors will support and guide you throughout this process.
The program covers the following themes:
- Digital strategy and competing in data-driven business
- Key technologies and future digital solutions – latest business applications and company cases
- Digital organization and leading the transformation journey
- Digital platform economy and dimensions of the digital market
- Defining the role of data
- Building a winning data team
- Digital technology management
- Leading in the digital world
- Leading a digital organization
Program structure
Three Core Modules
Eight face-to-face days held in Aalto University Töölö in Helsinki, Finland
One Elective Module
One 2- or 3-day module of your choice from the elective module pool
Stanford Online's course
Building an AI-Enabled Organization Flexible, self-paced online course includes lecture videos, exercises, knowledge checks, and final exam or project.
Digital Transformation Plan
Individual strategy project completed during the program
Schedule
Instructors
Henri Schildt
Dr. Henri Schildt is a full professor in strategy at Aalto University.
He is an enthusiastic educator, with more than a decade of experience in teaching executive education in themes related to strategy, artificial intelligence, and organizational change. He is currently a co-leader of the research project “Smarter Work with Artificial Intelligence”. His other research interests include corporate entrepreneurship, industry-level transformations, and strategies of social organizations. His book ‘The Data Imperative’ was published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
Patrick Furu
Dr. Patrick Furu works as a Director at Aalto EE. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Management at Hult International Business School.
He has 20 years of experience in consultancy and executive education for management concerning strategies, change processes, and competence development.
He has worked with many large companies, such as Aviva, Cargotec, Ericsson, Fortum, NCC, Nokia, Nordea, Pfizer, SEB, Skanska, Telia, and UPM. Patrick has board work experience in SMEs. His past activities include top management group experience in the IT industry.
Patrick’s research has centred on strategic knowledge creation and sharing in multinational companies, the role of the board of directors in medium-sized companies, and leadership models and processes in improvising jazz bands and classical music ensembles. At Aalto EE, Patrick covers topics such as strategy creation and execution, the interface between leadership and strategy, managing complexity, agile organizational forms, digital leadership, and high-performing teams and collective competence.
Kimmo Karhu
Kimmo Karhu is an Assistant Professor, at Aalto University Department of Industrial Engineering and Management.
Karhu is an expert on platform business models and a seasoned teacher on digital strategy. By combining hands-on industry experience with academic thinking, he seeks to explain how AI, machine learning, and other technologies can be leveraged for scaling platform business. Karhu's recent doctoral thesis analyses open platform strategizing and digital tactics in mobile ecosystems.
Iiris Lahti
Iris Lahti is specialized in driving the utilization of data and helping companies to evolve their data driven culture, scale up their data capabilities and gain sustainable business value from data and AI solutions.
For the past 15+ years, she has been focusing on understanding and resolving how different companies find the most relevant data and refine and integrate it into their business processes and daily work. She has worked as a business controller, a consultant helping clients in various industries to utilize the full potential of their data and analytics systems, and as a development director of data utilization in Sanoma Media Finland. Her role at Sanoma was to drive the company-wide data-driven culture transformation and lead a team of 20+ analysts and data scientists supporting consumer sales, media content design, customer service, and digital service development operations.
She is a founding partner of AI Roots, a network and agency for data professionals. At AI Roots, she helped companies across various industries build winning data teams and exploit the potential of data through the right skills and talent.
Currently she works at Saidot, contributing to the development of an AI governance platform aiming at supporting the responsible usage of AI in organizations.
Program Fee and Registration
Graduate Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership Stand-Alone Modules
You can choose to take the full Graduate Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership program, including all three core modules and one elective module of your choice, or register for individual stand-alone modules:
