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Leading Digital Transformation – Executive Diploma in Digital Strategy and Leadership

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 Leading Digital Transformation 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 Leading Digital Transformation 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. 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 needs.

The Leading Digital Transformation program is worth 18 ECTS credits, which can be transferred to the Aalto EMBA or Aalto MBA program.

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Rolling intake

By completing this program, you will be eligible for alumni status and become part of Aalto EE's global alumni community. The alumni community offers valuable benefits that support your professional development and networking:

  • Invitations to exclusive alumni events and networking opportunities
  • An alumni newsletter that brings together the most important news, events, and content
  • The opportunity to participate in most of our programs at a special fee

Read more about the alumni community

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.

Understand how you as a leader can develop structures, practices, and a culture to leverage the potential and support strategy execution.
Learn to analyze and formulate strategies to utilize, develop, and commercialize digital technologies and data.
Get insights into key technologies and their potential business applications to understand the optimal way of linking them with your business.
Ensure your technology and business strategies are aligned for successful transformation.
Identify what capabilities and competencies your strategy and long-term plans require.

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 Leading Digital Transformation program has a modular structure, consisting of three core modules and one elective modules. Each of the core modules are held once a year and you can start the program with any of the modules. The program incorporates individual assignments and a project work.

You will have the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of the program themes through facilitated workshops, interactive faculty lectures, and company cases. 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 needs, you can focus either on technology portfolio management or digital strategy development in your plan. 


All Leading Digital Transformation study modules can also be taken as stand-alone programs.

Core Modules

Elective Module

As a full program participant of Leading Digital Transformation, you may choose one elective module from a large selection. There is a variety of modules available, for example:

  • AI Methods and Applications
  • Strategic Foresight in Business Management
  • Vastuullinen digitalisaatio ja sosiaalinen vastuullisuus (in Finnish)
  • Global Strategy
  • Strategic Sustainability for Business
  • Negotiation Skills (available both in Finnish and English)

Aalto Tech Executive MBA / Aalto Tech MBA

By continuing your studies in the Aalto EMBA or MBA program after completing the Leading Digital Transformation program program, you will further expand and deepen your management skills and graduate from the unique Aalto Tech EMBA or MBA program.

Together, these programs form a holistic leadership development journey. The Leading Digital Transformation program equips leaders to apply their capacity in a digitally evolving business environment, while the Aalto MBA/Executive MBA program builds their broader general management capacity.

Read more about Aalto Tech MBA programs

Instructors

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 School of Science.

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. 

In his doctoral thesis, Karhu analyzed open platform strategizing and digital tactics in mobile ecosystems.

Iiris Lahti

Iiris Lahti is a data and AI strategist who specializes 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.

Lahti 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 as Head of Services & Customer Success at Saidot, contributing to the development of an AI governance platform that aims to support the responsible use of AI in organizations.

Paavo Ritala

Paavo Ritala is a Professor of Strategy and Innovation at the Business School at LUT University.

His main research themes include ecosystems and platforms, the role of data, algorithms, and digital technologies in organizations, and the circular and regenerative economy. His research has been published in the field-leading outlets such as Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Research Policy, and Academy of Management Perspectives. He is closely involved with business practice through research projects, executive and professional education programs, and in speaker and advisory roles. In recent years, his research and coaching have helped dozens of companies in renewing their strategy to accommodate new data-driven digital technologies such as generative AI, digital platforms, and more.

Prof. Ritala is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of R&D Management and serves on the editorial review boards of Journal of Product Innovation Management and Organization & Environment.

Program Fee and Registration

Program start

Leading Digital Transformation Stand-Alone Modules

You can take the complete Leading Digital Transformation program or register for individual stand-alone Leading Digital Transformation modules: