Innovation education is getting innovative.

Business schools that teach innovation to executives are faced with the same kind of challenges their clients face -- a crowded market and fast-paced technological change. So just as they counsel their students to do, they are revamping their methods.

In particular, schools are trying to move away from staid lectures and lessons about thinking outside the box. 'Innovation has to be learned by doing,' says Luke Williams, head of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at New York University's Stern School of Business. Any professor whose course about innovation is based on case studies 'is just fooling themselves,' Mr. Williams says.

Next month, Mr. Williams will lead a team of executives through his two-day, $2,800 'Disruptive Leadership: Fostering a Culture of Game-Changing Innovation,' which offers step-by-step plans for innovation at the individual, team and organizational levels.

Executives in the class will identify and challenge conceptual frameworks about products and pricing that have restricted their creativity and have kept them thinking about business the same way for years.

For example, if a cellphone doesn't work, a traditionalassumption would be that its battery needs to be recharged. Mr. Williams wants his students to rejecttraditional assumptions and think in terms of 'unreasonable provocation' -- thoughts that will get creative juices flowing. A better question, he says, could be why a cellphone needs a battery at all.

This spring Columbia Business School created two new innovation courses for executives, including 'Reinventing Innovation: Transforming Innovation into a Sustainable Capability.' Before arriving on campus for the four-day class, which cost $7,950 this year, participants took an online self-assessment to measure their tolerance for ambiguity and other personality traits that come in handy for innovation.

Eric Abrahamson, a management professor who teaches the class, helps participants identify a specificproject to which they'll apply their new skills. One student in a recent session sought to improve interdepartmental collaboration, while another wanted to figure out how to protect innovations from copycats. During the course, lectures -- including one by a group of jazz musicians on the value of improvisation -- are immediately followed by workshops, in which four-person teams share their progress and give feedback on the projects they identified earlier.

Other innovative approaches to inspiring fresh ideas include 'Leading Innovation: From Idea to Execution' at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. The course addresses topics such as the economics of innovation, how innovation fits into a growth strategy and how ideas are formed. The five-day, $11,000 course will have its third run later this month and attracts about 40 senior executives.

The module on the costs and benefits of innovation is crucial because most people who take the course don't have a finance background. 'They're technologists, they're not financiers,' says Bob Howell, a professor of finance at Tuck. 'They need to have an understanding of the financial implications of their actions.'

Some schools, and businesses, are offering executive-innovation courses only online. In late October, the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, will introduce 'Leading Innovative Change,' to be delivered entirely online in partnership with ExecOnline, a business that works with companies and business schools to create online executive-training programs. The web format will expand Haas's reach: Campus-based executive courses are usually capped at 60 people; this class tops 200.

The six-week course addresses topics such as the proper mind-set and organizational model to support innovation. Pricing details weren't disclosed but ExecOnline CEO Stephen Bailey says it costs 'a fraction' of a weeklong, campus-based offering.

Sony Corp.'s Sony Pictures Entertainment tapped 45 employees this spring to participate in Apollo Group Inc.'s Innovator's Accelerator, a six-week web course taught by Clayton Christensen, Hal Gregersen and Jeffrey Dyer; the three are the co-authors of 'The Innovator's DNA' and professors, respectively, at Harvard Business School, Insead and the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University.

The class from Apollo, owner of the University of Phoenix, carries a list price of $1,999 per person and includes video lessons on networking, experimentation and teamwork, as well as group projects. It was launched in January.

Executives at Sony nominated team members from across the company to participate in the course, after the company acknowledged that its core business model was under strain. Participants are now pursuing three major projects, including finding more cost-effective models for the early stages of a production and seeking alternatives to traditional product placement.