Within the Innovation Management program, the Collaborative Innovation & Marketing track is the only option concentrating on innovation strategies (such as open innovation and servitization) and the customer end of the innovation process (including designing the customer experience). There is particular attention to sustainable innovation and customer demand. As such, this track provides students with a profile that combines analytical capabilities (e.g., quantitative research skills), customer-oriented thinking, sensitivity to stakeholder interests and the ability to align these interests. Students who complete this track are systematic, informed decision-makers who are exceptionally well-prepared for a successful career in supply chain innovation, open innovation, ecosystem management, customer experience management, strategic management and new product/services marketing. However, the skill set developed is also desirable in many other jobs and settings.
Core courses
During the first year of Innovation Management, the four core courses build up students’ key knowledge of how to best manage innovation processes in the context of sustainability and an ever-changing world. Students also develop essential quantitative and qualitative methodological skills, including systems thinking and modeling. As with all TU/e programs, these skills are imparted through a mix of interactive lectures, engaging assignments and group work covering topics related to state-of-the-art research by the university’s professors. With regard to the relationship between the track and the core course, this track is mostly quantitatively oriented and thus applies many of the insights from quantitative methods and multivariate statistics. Understanding the ecosystem perspective requires an appreciation of dynamics between stakeholders, which relates to the core course system dynamics.
Collaborative Innovation & Marketing Track courses
Students gain state-of-the-art insights through the following four track courses. Some course names may change as the program develops. Visit the education guide to find more information about the curriculum of this track.
- Managing and Organizing Open Innovation: Lays the foundation for understanding how companies can innovate together with users, customers, suppliers and other organizations in the ecosystem.
- Marketing and Innovation: Focuses in particular on the role of customers in the innovation process (i.e., as a key stakeholder). Also introduces the concept of delivering value.
- Servitization and Customer Experience: Introduces the strategy of servitization, which helps companies move towards sustainable innovation. Also further develops the concept of value via the customer experience concept.
- Strategic Management of Technology: Discusses strategies that help companies analyze and manage the transformative potential of emerging technologies and how the potential is deployed through organizational structure, resource efficiency, human capital and intellectual property strategies.
TU/e also offers the possibility to further customize and personalize your Innovation Management master’s degree by choosing courses from other tracks or other electives. This allows you to broaden your field of expertise and increase your employability. Options for customization include courses from the tracks Technology Entrepreneurship, AI & Digital Technology, Sustainability Transitions, and Leadership & Organizing Innovation.
Graduation project
The graduation project is conducted in the last semester of the curriculum. Within this track, the project mostly involves solving an unstructured problem at large companies (e.g., Philips, Signify, DAF, Vanderlande, ASML, VDL or Océ/Canon) but smaller companies are possible too. Projects are supervised by your mentor, an experienced teacher/coach in this track. Your mentor can also help you in finding a suitable project. Previous projects have included:
- Developing a strategy and a set of related tools for a large company to develop the ecosystem around an innovation they are developing. Our student first analyzed the bottlenecks for the development of the ultrasound technology ecosystem based on interviews with various stakeholders in the ecosystem. The study then resulted in the development of a few concrete tools to help the company in getting a better understanding of where the ecosystem should develop and better aligning the stakeholders with that purpose.
- Investigating the role of price promotions in product ecosystems in which multiple products and services work together seamlessly, creating a unified customer experience like Apple’s iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, App Store, etc. Using regression-based analytics on product installation and promotional campaign data of more than 200,000+ households, our student found that price promotions stimulate customers to purchase faster and more frequently in the short term but do not necessarily stimulate customers to purchase more. In the long run, price promotions make customers take more time between expansions and purchase less products.
- Studying how overweight or obese patients respond to a digital healthcare advice app and how these responses influence their subsequent behavior. Using an experimental setup with 335 respondents, our student demonstrated that developers can strategically use ex-patients sharing their story to assist current patients who are already confident in their knowledge of their treatment. Patients also perceive advice from healthcare companies as subject to hidden agendas (e.g., profit) whereas advice from artificial intelligence has some trust issues but is perceived as more genuine.
- Understanding how SMEs can successfully transition towards offering advanced product-service systems. Building on structured and coded interviews, our student developed a servitization maturity model for SMEs that assesses the current capabilities of a firm, identifies desirable maturity levels and provides improvement measures and benchmarks.
- Developing strategies to tackle the energy transition effectively from the bottom up. Our student developed a causal loop model to capture the influence of time pressure and time windows on the collaborative process, which should alternate the prioritization of decision-making speed and innovation. This creates a dynamic in which the team goes through collaborative processes whenever time pressure is low but pragmatic results are prioritized when time pressure is high.
These are just examples; students also have a high degree of freedom to choose a topic that appeals to them and matches their career vision.
Studying abroad
Given the global nature of innovation and marketing, TU/e also wishes to provide students with opportunities for international experience. A master’s degree in Innovation Management therefore offers the option to go abroad in the first two quartiles of the second year of the program. In an increasingly globalized world, the opportunity to spend part of your program elsewhere can provide valuable experience for an international career in (technological) entrepreneurship.