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10. Innovation and new business ventures

Entrepreneurship and innovation management are relatively new areas of management education. The recent rapid growth of new businesses worldwide responding both to countries warming up to the role of private enterprise and to restructuring and downsizing trends in large companies created the necessity of understanding what makes individuals begin businesses and what is required for making them sustainable and to disseminate this knowledge widely among other potential business initiators. Concomitantly companies worldwide are increasingly realising that the capacity to be ahead of competitors doesn’t depend only on sound business practices but more and more so on providing new and improved products and processes. The understanding of how innovation and technical change progresses has also improved significantly over the last few years and courses on innovation management are now becoming standard in management degrees. Today’s managers need to grapple with the complexities of starting new businesses and innovating.

This course will introduce participants into the content, context, processes and impact of entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. It will thus focus on the links between new product and process creation and company strategy and the factors and methods leading to sound new businesses. It also concentrates on how to devise, implement and assess processes aimed at the successful commercialisation of new products and adoption of new technologies and the long-term sustainability of emerging businesses. It will delve on ways of measuring the outcomes of the processes at stake and the effect on corporate performance. MITE is not, however, a 'technical' course. It neither addresses the engineering dimension of technology nor the financial dimensions of businesses but rather on how to plan and mobilise scientific and engineering knowledge, human and organisational resources and skills and available machinery and equipment for innovation and business growth. MITE is also not a ‘normative’ course, i.e. where prescriptions of what to do are given -a 'tool box'-, as these should be individually developed by each one of the participants according to their own individual circumstances.