Every year companies across the globe spend billions of dollars developing and marketing innovations to improve the way we work, live, and play. The vast majority of these innovations fail when introduced to the market. This course is about learning how to create innovative solutions that are likely to succeed in the market. 

Marketing innovation is defined as the implementation of new marketing practices involving significant changes in the design, packaging, distribution, promotion or pricing of a product or service. This course will focus on the product-related marketing activities involved in the marketing innovation process, and cover topics such as understanding customer needs, creative idea generation, concept testing, and effect estimation.

This course will focus on the logic and structure of an innovation process, the way it typically takes place in organizations. It starts with an identification of unmet customer needs. The next stage is creative idea generation, wherein a number of ideas are identified, and a sub-selection of them selected for further concept development. The selected concepts (prototypes) are then shown to potential customers for estimating the market potential involved with the concept/s. The course culminates in a business case where the financial potential of the new concept is estimated based on estimated costs and revenue.

The objective of this course is to provide students with the capabilities to create innovative product concepts and to make smart bets – knowing which product concepts are worth investing in. The aim is to combine the insights provided market research with the strategic considerations involved in the development of a new product. The students will learn how to present and argue for their business case, both in oral presentations and in a written term paper.