The course explores strategic management choices along with the role of innovation in creating sustainable competitive advantage. It introduces frameworks and tools of strategic management (e.g. how to analyze organizations in their industry context and how to design and execute a coherent strategy). Concepts such as value creation, product diversification, clustering and open innovation will be explored to understand how entrepreneurs manage innovation inside and outside of the boundaries of organizations. 

In addition to the basics of innovation and strategy, the course will introduce insights and tools from fields such as entrepreneurship (e.g. how and why individuals identify promising opportunities while others do not), marketing (e.g. how the transfer from early, small market segments to broad market segments can be managed), and management (e.g. how new business models in the area of open and distributed innovation can look like).