The general objective of this course is to provide you with academic knowledge and hands-on practice of the ways in which marketing performs innovation activities. Furthermore, it is the course's purpose to provide insight into the interaction of marketing with other sources important for innovation. These can be internal functions e.g., operations, R&D, human resource management, information systems, as well as external sources, e.g., customers, competitors, policy makers. This leads to the following questions that you will address in this course:
* How can innovation be defined? What are drivers, dimensions, and pitfalls of innovation?
* What is the role of strategic marketing in innovation activities and the firm’s board room? How can market trends be detected?
* How do you deal with cross-functional coordination? How to capture external ideas, skills and resources for innovation?
* What are key marketing innovation activities during each stage of the innovation process? What are state-of-art tools in innovation management?
* How are innovations adopted and diffused in the market and how can marketing influence that?
* What are recent integrated innovation-marketing approaches such as design thinking or growth hacker marketing?
This course is designed to balance scientific state-of-the-art insights with real-life challenges and managerial applications. You also get the opportunity to hear from different companies about their innovation activities, simulate marketing innovation tasks, and practice the development of your own innovative product/service idea.
You will further practice a broad range of skills including presentation, writing, analytical, creative, communication, teamwork, and project management skills. If you are intellectually curious and seeking to expand your knowledge boundaries, you are in the right place. Most importantly, we hope you find this course both enjoyable and fulfilling.

Innovation is one of the most critical issues in business today, essential for the sustainable success of both commercial and non-commercial organizations. Innovation enhances citizens' lives and well-being through improved quality of products and services, lower prices, and heightened business performance by transforming existing markets and creating new ones. In light of the Grand Challenges and the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), innovation is fundamental to securing the future of our planet.

Marketing connects organizations to their customers and is crucial for maintaining competitiveness, especially given today's disruptive foundational technologies (e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Robotics, Quantum Computing, Brain-Computer Interfaces) and reality-enhancing technologies (e.g., Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Metaverse), combined with rapidly evolving customer needs. Organizations that fail to adapt and innovate risk losing to more innovative competitors, potentially threatening their very survival.

Marketing, particularly strategic marketing, is uniquely positioned to drive understanding and management of innovation within organizations and markets. Innovation primarily aims to create new and improved products, services, and processes tailored to the needs of customers and other stakeholders. The essential trigger for innovation is identifying and meeting customer needs more effectively than competitors. Strategic decision-making sits at the heart of innovation by identifying new market opportunities and aligning internal and external stakeholders with the organization's innovation initiatives. Strategic marketing and innovation management also focus on shaping the structure, culture, and processes necessary for organizational success. Ultimately, the organization must deliver greater value than its competitors. However, simply having a promising product idea is insufficient—it must be effectively implemented to be truly considered an innovation.

As a prospective strategic marketing manager, you must understand marketing's role in organizational innovation, sense and respond to the evolving technological landscape, monitor your company's innovation performance, and master marketing tools and techniques to drive continuous improvement.

State-of-the-art literature published in the leading marketing and innovation journals and in popular press. A detailed literature list will be available online.

• All students who are admitted to the master International Business can follow this course.
• Exchange students with a Bachelor degree in Business, or with another Bachelor degree, including a minor in Marketing are also admitted.
• This course assumes knowledge of innovation management at an introductory level.
• An advanced level of English.