Innovation Management

Your business needs to keep developing to retain or extend competitive advantage. The New Business Development programme offers you an understanding of today’s marketplace in which customers are more aware, active, and value-driven. Your company must rapidly create products and services that inspire, include and reflect your clients’ values which have increased the importance of business development even more.

Execute, deliver and sustain innovation

During the Innovation Management programme by RSM Executive Education, you will explore new approaches to innovation management that are based on solid scientific results, and provide practical guidance at the same time. In eight evening masterclasses, you will learn why and how companies must rapidly create services and products that inspire. You will be able to set out a strategic direction for innovation in your company, identify new business development activities, and implement this direction in your activities and organisation. You also learn to integrate imaginative new approaches to innovation, and to your business development activities.

Your new knowledge and perspectives will enable a continuous re-examination of progress and development that can bring innovations to the firm, and that the firm can bring to the market, so it can thrive and keep ahead.

Learning objectives

After this programme, you will be able to:

• use new approaches to innovation management and new business development based on scientific theories, and apply these to practical issues within your organisation
• create the right environment to execute, deliver, and sustain innovation in order to drive business development and process improvement
• set out a strategic direction for your innovation and new business development
• choose your innovation portfolio.

Curriculum

RSM's Innovation Management programme comprises eight evening sessions which are augmented by some guided preparation work. During each classroom session, our faculty members will introduce you to an aspect of innovation management. We will provide recommended reading materials, online articles, and business study cases that will help you to prepare for the classroom sessions. We will also ask you to prepare descriptions of relevant situations from your own organisations in advance of the classroom sessions.

Session 1: Introduction and scenario development

• introduction
• what is innovation management?
• trends analysis
• why is it important?

Session 2: The science of creativity

• creativity defined
• defining what makes people creative
• application to business models
• Erasmus value proposition framework.

Session 3: Design thinking, or customer-centric innovation

• when and how to involve customers in business development
• narrowing down the solution space
• lean innovation.

Session 4: Strategy for innovation

• disruptive innovation
• strategy models in new business development
• the innovator’s dilemma
• barriers for disruptive innovation and possible solutions
• what to include in a business plan.

Session 5: Portfolio and project management

• assessing value of innovation projects
• innovations as real options
• deciding which innovation projects join the portfolio using the ‘strategic buckets’ method
• crafting and managing the innovation portfolio.

Session 6: Innovation leadership and teams

• stakeholder management
• persuasion
• idea communication.

Session 7: Organisation and culture of innovation

• business development process
• context dependencies
• social networks defined and relevance
• opportunities and challenges for individuals and organisations
• traditional and alternative models for business development.

Session 8: Open innovation

• open innovation, a new paradigm
• the rise of start-ups
• corporate venturing
• an integrated growth strategy.