Innovation and enterprise

Recognising opportunities

Solve problems and generate new opportunities in novel and valuable ways, and better harness your full creative and innovative potential. Learn how creativity is a key driver of organisational innovation, and critical to providing value and ensuring long-term survival. No matter what career or profession, being more creative and understanding how modern organisations grow will help you to be more valuable, more employable, more innovative, and more entrepreneurial.

Leveraging your Ecosystem for Innovation

Learn how the opportunities and challenges posed by the digital economy, technological connectedness and open innovation, are driving organisations to strategically harness the power of the crowd. This highly experiential and challenge-led topic is designed to help students: understand how crowd based innovation methods such as crowdsourcing, co-creation and crowdfunding are used to create competitive advantage, improve society, and disrupt  markets.

Doing Good While Doing Well

Explore social entrepreneurship as a lever for improving the world, and as a lens to understand business and strategy. Learn how the principles of social entrepreneurship can motivate individuals and organisations to solve pressing social, environmental and economic problems whilst, at the same time, drive competitive advantage and growth.

Validating  Desirability, Feasibility and Viability

The most effective innovators and entrepreneurs are those who can adapt their ideas to fit reality. This topic focuses on a variety of hands-on tools for testing the desirability, feasibility and viability of any idea. Learn to investigate user needs, test customers and investors' willingness to pay, and use these insights to validate the potential of an innovation or new venture.

User Centred Design & Development

Creating market value with a technological or scientific solution is hard. Many new products fail in the market as they do not solve a problem for users or customers, may not be willing to pay the price for any value created. Learn about design thinking, agile development and lean startup methodology as important foundations of the new product development lifecycle. Using hands-on exercises, develop practical and creative innovation skills to help solve real-life technological and commercial problems.

Creating a Roadmap from Opportunity to Action

Business Models define how organisations create and capture value and are critical to the successful growth of new and existing ventures. Whether launching a venture, assessing an opportunity, or transforming an existing enterprise, learn how to evaluate which business model best fits your market. Explore cutting-edge concepts, skills, know-how, attitudes and innovative alternatives relevant for designing a successful business model and go-to-market strategy.  

Commercialising STEM opportunities

Make better business model decisions when commercializing new products or technologies that potentially disrupt markets. Whether you're launching a new business, or focused on growing an existing enterprise. Learn how to generate insights, gather the right resources, and develop appropriate and novel business models to successfully launch innovative and disruptive technologies and ventures.

Entrepreneurial Strategies, Resources & Activities

Few enterprises lack innovative ideas, they are usually vast and plentiful. On the other hand, only a small proportion of ideas are ever successfully launched in the marketplace and the statistics for innovation and start-up failure rates are eye watering. Great ideas need great execution but even great execution cannot make a success out of a bad idea. Learn the skills to “think creatively” and “act entrepreneurially”, whilst bringing an opportunity to life, from ideation through to launch.

Pitching for Finance, Resources and Support

This topic is for anyone who wants to gain financial and/or management support for their innovation. Learn how to construct a strong business case and develop effective communication skills, with the goal of convincing backers to “buy in" to your “bright idea.”
Understand potential financial resources including equity and non-equity options, crowdfunding, government grants, VC and Angel investor. Create a professional pitch deck with great presentation skills to accompany it.

Leveraging STEM Driven Innovation

Technology startups are not smaller versions of large companies as they don't systematically manage the production and sales of products/services. Instead they're in search mode, looking for innovative product-market fit and a sustainable business model. Learn about agile innovation processes, new technology adoption, finding first customers, and a range of entrepreneurial tools and techniques important for launching technology-driven innovations and start-ups.