The Leadership & Organizing Innovation track is structured to give students a broad understanding of how people can function effectively in innovative work environments. The courses offered therefore focus on creating, managing and implementing innovations in the context of high-tech companies, knowledge-intensive organizations and sustainability challenges.
Core courses
During the first year of Innovation Management, the core course will introduce you to the overarching themes of the program – including knowledge pertaining to innovation (and business) creation and managing the innovation process, which will be built upon in the Leadership & Organizing Innovation track. As with all TU/e programs, this knowledge is 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.
Leadership & Organizing Innovation track courses
Visit the education guide to find more information about the curriculum of this track. Leadership & Organizing Innovation consists of four courses*:
- Collaborative Innovation. Companies increasingly depend on collaborative processes in which knowledge is distributed across individuals, organizations and industries. Developing solutions to complex societal challenges also specifically requires collaboration between various stakeholders in broader ecosystems. In this course, students learn how to theorize about such open innovation processes and how to apply them in practice. Students develop related understanding and skills regarding how to manage the individuals, organizations and environments involved in open innovation processes.
- Implementing and Adapting to AI in Organizations. Technological innovations have been fundamentally shaping organizations and work over recent decades. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) methods and systems will create far-reaching changes that will affect individuals, teams and leaders in organizations. To better understand the role of (implementing) AI in organizations and to enable effective human-AI collaboration, this course will combine theories from organizational psychology, human-technology interaction and computer science to address AI at the individual, team and organizational levels.
- Leadership of Innovation and Change. The development of creative ideas, products and services requires effective leadership and management. In this course, students will develop a thorough understanding of how leadership and management practices contribute to human functioning in innovative environments in terms of creativity, problem solving, collaboration, information sharing and decision-making. Students will be challenged to develop competencies for creating optimal conditions for individuals and teams to excel in complex, fast-paced and technologically advanced innovative environments.
- Managing Team Dynamics and Team Performance. In this course, students learn about, theorize about and experience teams from both a team member and management perspective. After this course, students will be able to translate scientific knowledge into concrete behaviors, identify the good and not-so-good processes within and between teams and intervene in team processes in order to optimize innovation and performance. This course will involve students in an intensive, thorough and hands-on investigation of the literature on managing organizational teams. During each meeting, we will cover a topic in depth using a combination of case studies and group discussions.
* The course names and content may be subject to change
In order to graduate, Innovation Management students must complete eight track courses in total, including at least one entire track. They can add a second complete track or follow four different courses from the other tracks.
Graduation projects
The graduation project is conducted in the last semester of the curriculum. Many students do their project at large companies in the Brainport area but smaller companies and other geographical areas are equally possible. Together with their company supervisor and academic supervisors, students formulate a practical, and scientifically relevant research question.
Previous graduation projects have included:
- How can a non-player orchestrator increase the psychological ownership (PO) for the innovation ecosystem among its participating representatives? A student studied this in collaboration with Hello New Day. Using a design science approach, he formulated a solution design for how Hello New Day (and other non-player orchestrators) can assess and stimulate actor representatives’ sense of ownership for the innovation ecosystem by increasing representatives’ knowledge of, control over and investment in the ecosystem.
- How can a marketing company increase collaboration among its employees? In a globally oriented marketing company in Barcelona, a student developed a self-leadership training intervention and tested whether this intervention could increase the collaborative behavior (i.e., functional assertiveness and knowledge sharing) of employees. Using a quasi-experimental design, he found that participants did increase their use of self-leadership strategies in practice, which increased their functional assertiveness but not their knowledge sharing behavior.
- Can cross-functional teams improve the effectiveness of their response to a last-minute change in a project? A student examined this at Movico – a company that specializes in roadshow marketing and show events. Employing an embedded multiple-case study, she found evidence that shared cognitions (knowing how everyone works) help teams to be more attuned and flexible in responding to last minute changes. She developed an intervention design to help Movico respond more effectively to last minute changes by fostering the creation and updating of shared cognitions in cross-functional project teams through interventions aimed at enhancing role clarity, cross-expertise, team orientation, mutual support and planning accuracy.
- Agility is very important for today’s companies in order to maintain their competitive advantage, and to obtain this companies need to focus on their ‘human capital’ because employees in agile companies need to be able to cope with more uncertainty, become more versatile and develop tolerance for work in a changing work environment. A student examined the role of transformational leadership and established its importance for increasing employees’ adaptive performance in a sample among small to medium-sized manufacturing companies. Because transformational leaders enhance both the psychological safety and work engagement of employees, employees were quicker to take action and to put in more effort in adapting to the requested changes.
These are just examples; students have a high degree of freedom to choose a topic that appeals to them and matches their career vision.
Studying abroad
Today, innovation is often global in nature. TU/e therefore wishes to provide students with opportunities for international experience and a master’s degree in Innovation Management offers the option to go abroad in the first two quartiles of the second year of the program. In an increasingly interconnected world, the opportunity to spend part of your program elsewhere can provide valuable experience for an international career in (technological) innovation.