Designing a Graduate Curriculum for Digital Innovation: A Competency-Driven Approach

Organizations are increasingly dependent on information systems (IS) solutions for driving process innovation, improving responsiveness, and enabling informed decision-making. In recognizing the need for graduates with the business and technical acumen to lead technology-driven organizational transformations, we undertook the redesign of an IS graduate program to focus on digital innovation. In this paper, we first describe the technology- and market-driven process for designing the curriculum for a new Master of Science in Digital Innovation (MSDI). A competency-based approach is then developed for defining expected outcomes from the MSDI. Four higher-level competency areas are identified, each of which is comprised of varying numbers of lower-level, more specific competencies. Core courses are mapped to theses lower-level competencies, for which minimum required levels of achievement are specified. The resulting framework contributes to ongoing efforts for defining learning outcomes for use in designing and evaluating future-focused graduate curriculum