Marketing, Creativity and Innovation (15 ECTS) aims to further develop the student’s understanding about why firms needs to be creative and committed on to explore new technologies - while at the same time being trend conscious and committed on to co-create new concepts with end-users. Accordingly, the course aims to develop an understanding of marketing’s role (as a perspective, area of capabilities and organizational unit) in firms’ innovation processes. Furthermore, the course aims to equip the student with the needed management frameworks and tools in order to become a successful corporate entrepreneur of new product and business development processes.

Corporate Branding, Networks and Communities (7 ECTS) deals with one of the most essential prerequisites for securing a continuous and successful process of identifying and implementing ideas for innovation and business development, namely that the firm has ongoing and productive relationships with various external learning partners. In light of this presumption, one essential aim of the course is to develop the student’s understanding of how networks (in b-to-b relationship) and communities (in b-to-c relationships) are established and operate. Furthermore, the course aims to develop an understanding about the role that corporate branding may play in the management of relationships in innovation processes.

Marketing Research in Innovation Processes (7 ECTS) is concerned with the issue of generating and making use of customer and end-user knowledge in product/service and business model development processes. Accordingly, one essential aim of the course is to further develop the student’s competencies and skills about qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, analysis and representation. Another and related aim concerns an understanding of the particular context and decision situation - where knowledge of a qualitative and/or quantitative nature is imperative.

Strategic Leadership and Brand Management (15 ECTS) runs throughout the second semester as a sequence of seminars, case-works and projects. During the first part of the course, we make a critical analysis of existing strategic concepts and frameworks in the contemporary marketing and brand management literature. Thereafter it is the business world and the management context of corporate level marketing managers that stands in focus. The overall aim of the course is to produce the basis for answering the following question: What is the meaning of strategy and strategic leadership in different contexts and situations when the vision is ‘market creation’ through product, brand and/or channel innovation?

Consumer’s Experiences and Design (7 ECTS) is based on the view that experiences create strong emotional ties to brands and strengthen brand differentiation and equity. One essential aim of the course is therefore to create an understanding of the implication of perceiving consumers as living ‘embodied experiences’ where body and mind (cognitions and emotions) are integrated and how experiences become ‘embedded’ in physical and cultural environments – making experiences authentic, local and global at the same time. A second and related aim concerns how we can make use of this understanding in the creation of new concepts relating to a firm’s market offerings.

Managing Knowledge, Projects and Teams (7 ECTS) has a reason in a recurrent phenomenon and problem in practice, namely that innovation projects tend to be carried out in a repetitive and non productive way as regards to new knowledge creation and learning. One explanation to a reluctance to change ‘the way things gets done’ lies according to the literature in a failure to recognize that leading and managing are two different things - and that project management needs to be understood and managed from both a strategic, a tactical and operational perspective. The overall aim of the course relates to these propositions. Additionally, it relates to the notion that project management is in essence about knowledge management.