Why is this course important?

Big breakthroughs come when teams and organizations are able to combine existing knowledge in new ways. Knowledge brokers make this possible. They are creative cross-disciplinary thinkers that are able to see patterns and overlaps that others miss. Despite the importance of knowledge brokerage, the specific role of the knowledge broker in making it possible has gone mostly unrecognized and under appreciated. Those that act as knowledge brokers within their organizations often do so informally and suffer from a lack of recognition, a lack of tools to support them in their activities, and a lack of codified best practices from which they can collectively define and refine their field. This course aims to rectify that by providing a formal certification backed by an accredited university, hands-on access to free industry-leading tools specifically for knowledge brokers, and real-world case studies from a growing consortium of interdisciplinary organizations that view knowledge brokerage as essential to achieving their missions.

What does the course cover?

This course will give you accelerated hands-on experience with the practical mechanics of brokering knowledge, the tools involved, and the underlying research that validates why these methods work so well. Our goal is to have you finish the course confident that you can reliably and repeatably facilitate the co-production of innovation within your own organization for your own use-cases. You'll learn to: 

1. Represent the complex situations in which knowledge brokerage is desired as flexible network models that can be mined using state-of-the-art tools.
2. Populate your situational model with data from multiple sources, including how to extract implicit knowledge and informal ontologies from domain experts.
3. Mine the resulting data-driven networks to find non-obvious overlaps, synergies, and gaps where knowledge brokerage efforts will result in the greatest impacts.
4. Facilitate conversations among diverse stakeholders and subject matter experts about the identified opportunities in a way that reliably establishes trust and psychological safety, leverages complementary difference, and leads to co-production within hours.
5. Capture the outputs of co-produced knowledge in a way that incentivizes collaboration, produces new opportunities for knowledge brokerage, and allows you to quantify and communicate the value your brokerage and facilitation efforts have added.

How is the course taught?

There are a variety of formats to choose from, from online to in-person, over the course of a month, or intensively over a single week. Regardless of the format you choose, instruction will follow a three-prong approach:

1. Live instruction (on-line or in-person) will introduce each concept, the underlying theory, and explore the practical application of that theory through case-studies.
2. Individual assignments will allow you to apply what was learned during instruction to a use-case of your own.
3. Facilitation assignments will have you work with others - either from the course or your own network - in order to develop the confidence that you can effectively integrate the concepts into a group or team setting to generate co-produced insights.

What time commitment is required?

The course is designed to involve approximately 40 hours of work between instruction, assignments, and facilitation exercises. That's one full-time week, or, if over the course of a month, translates to roughly 3 hours of instruction a week, 4 hours a week devoted to individual assignments and responding to personalized feedback from the instructor, and 3 hours a week for preparing for and conducting  facilitation exercises.  

How much does it cost?

The course cost is $1750 per person. This includes access to readings, online software tools, and digital micro-credentialing upon completion. Closed-group courses are available for employers who want a set of their employees to complete the course together. Current undergraduate students interested in careers in innovation and knowledge brokerage may qualify for a scholarship to take the course free-of-charge.

What certification will I receive?

Upon completion, students will receive a digital micro-credential from Oklahoma City University's Meinders School of Business. OCU's Meinders School of Business is AACSB accredited, which is considered the gold-standard for accreditation. OCU's Meinders School of Business ranks in the top 4.5% of business schools in the world. Your digital credential provides a badge which can be added to sites like linked-in, and can be used with employers to verify skill-specific competence.

How do I get enrolled?

Fill out the form on the right and we'll send you more specifics about the available courses that match your desired dates and format, along with information about how to get enrolled. 

Who is this course for?

Most people currently engaged in knowledge brokerage are called something other than “knowledge broker”. They may be team leads, program or portfolio managers, analysts, enterprise architects, data scientists, project managers, or facilitators. They may be leaders responsible for creating the enabling conditions in which knowledge brokerage can occur like consortia, R&D, community, digital transformation, knowledge management, or innovation directors. Regardless of the name of their role they often care more about the radical innovations that come from transdisciplinarity than the incremental innovations of specialization. They care more about the quality of an idea than who gets the credit for it - a mindset they sometimes suffer for. They tend to dislike hierarchy and they often feel like they don’t quite fit in to the traditional organizational roles they are asked to conform to. If any of the above resonates with you, this course is for you, regardless of whether you are completely new to the idea of knowledge brokerage, or whether you are an experienced facilitator looking to refine your existing skills and learn some new ones.

I have questions that weren't addressed above. How can I get more information?

Fill out the form on the right and let us know in the comments section what you'd like to know. We'll have an instructor reach out to you to answer whatever questions you might have.