The Yale School of Management thinks so. As part of the Yale Management integrated MBA curriculum, first-year students take the Innovator, a course designed to teach future managers how to become more innovative, as well as shape work environments to make creativity natural for their teams.

The course is run in three parts: idea generation; idea evaluation and development; and the steps necessary to make an idea a reality. According to the Yale School of Management's Jonathan Feinstein, the John G. Searle Professor of Economics and Management, quoted on its Web page, students must understand that there is a process to innovation, that inspiration is only a small part of being innovative in business. "Most people think of an idea as a light bulb moment," he says. "But that moment of insight is just the beginning. An idea has to work in the marketplace - otherwise, even the best idea will fall flat. So it's crucial to learn to play around with it, to find the sweet spot that allows a concept to be marketable."

The Innovator is built around a combination of cases and projects intended to help students better understand the creative process in a business sense. For one assignment, students were broken into groups and instructed to come up with a business idea, research the market for it, tweak it, and design a plan to bring it to market. "A number of students are insecure about their ability to be creative, so it was important to give them the experience and show them they, too, can be creative," Feinstein said. "This was a great assignment. It was their idea, which they developed and evaluated. It's wonderful anytime we can put students in contact with something tangible. A number of students came away with ideas they plan to pursue further."

There are plenty of business futurists, innovation advisers, trends trackers and innovation gurus out there whose main claim to fame is that they can teach people to innovate. Not all of them may have a lot to offer, but it's clearly a lesson many CIOs need to learn.