Overview

This online certificate program equips busy executives and entrepreneurs with the know-how and practical skills they need to find creative solutions to innovation challenges.

It will help you develop an entrepreneurial mindset and capitalize on your strengths to create a new business venture or an intrapreneurial project in your current organization.

You’ll learn to seize new opportunities, drive innovation, and design and implement a strategy. You’ll also discover how to develop appropriate social media and marketing approaches.

By committing to 10-12 hours of online study per week for five months, you can obtain the Innovation and Entrepreneurship MasterTrack® Certificate. You’ll also earn credits toward the MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MSIE).

Syllabus

Course 1: Entrepreneurship Strategy: From Ideation to Exit
- This course covers in the chronological order each defining step of an entrepreneurial project. It begins with very personal considerations related to getting to better know yourself so as to decide if you are ready for the multiple challenges of entrepreneurship. It then deals with creativity in order to provide the right set of tools to find an idea with the right potential to disrupt an existing business. We then discuss how to gather a founding team, how to raise money to initiate the project, and how to deal with day to day cash management. Later in the course, we discuss the art of selling, focusing on business to business sales, and how to measure the product launch phase using cohort analysis. Later on, we discuss the challenges of HR in an entrepreneurial environment, and of recruiting at a point where nobody knows your company. We then describe very practical techniques to initiate the international development of a small company. Last, we cover the exit strategy topic.

Course 2: Business Strategy
- - Understand your firm's competitive advantage as well as how to maintain and enhance it to stay ahead of the competition. - Analyze how a firm’s external environment (i.e. its competitors, suppliers, customers) as well as its internal capabilities and resources shape competitive advantage. - Develop a critical mindset when confronted with complex choices.

Course 3: New Product Development
- - Acquire a broad understanding of how to manage the new product development process. - Learn how to develop new products quickly enough to respond to new market opportunities or successfully bring new technological breakthroughs to market. - Understand why in spite of huge investments in innovation, many products fail to meet their sales targets

Course 4: Social Entrepreneurship and Changemaking
- - Gain a brief overview of different types of entrepreneurs who create value for society. - Work on your own entrepreneurial project and gain hands-on experience in transforming an idea into a sustainable business model with measurable positive impact on society and the environment. - Develop a pitch to sell your idea to a wider public. - Be inspired, equipped and convinced that you can take positive action to tackle the world’s most pressing problems in an entrepreneurial manner.

Course 5: Marketing Through Social Media
- - Understand the importance of word of mouth and consumer communities as market forces that influence decision-making throughout the purchasing process. - Learn how social media can be leveraged both in B2C and B2B contexts to better understand, connect with and accompany your customers.