Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Good day and welcome to managing innovation and entrepreneurship!

Course Introduction

Technological innovation is increasingly the source of sustainable competitive advantage for firms around the world. However, building an organization to successfully and repeatedly bring technological innovations to market is a daunting managerial challenge. In this course we focus on the practices and processes that managers use to manage innovation effectively. Moreover, you will be exposed to aspects of technological innovation: exploring, executing, leveraging and renewing innovation.

This course is designed to provide both a deep grounding in the field of technological innovation for managers and entrepreneurs whose goal is to play a leading role in innovation-driven firms.

You will also learn strategic issues (what should you do?) and organizational and managerial issues (how should you get it done?). The course design is grounded in the belief is that it is particularly dangerous to separate strategy from implementation (the “why” from the “how”) when innovation is the issue because having a great idea is worth little or nothing if a firm cannot figure out how to commercialize or monetize that idea.

The course is divided into five lessons

1. Dynamics of Technological Innovation
2. Industrial implications of technological innovation

• Exploring innovation

1. Executing innovation
2. Exploiting innovation

We use these lessons to achieve the following objectives:

1. A familiarity with current topics in strategic innovation management, such as innovation networks, idea brokering, open innovation;
2. A familiarity with innovation processes and structures such as R&D team and incentive design, R&D portfolio management, idea generation processes, the pros and cons of various R&D organizational structures, and the challenges of innovation in large and small firms;

• An understanding of the strategies most effective for exploiting innovations;

1. The ability to apply these concepts directly to real world situations;

Let’s Begin!