Mar­ket De­vel­op­ment

Course content

Both start-up entrepreneurs and managers in large companies often need to develop a market for their new products from scratch. They are facing a long journey from idea development to implementation (i.e. strategic market planning), prototyping and finally diffusion. This course aims to teach students the skills and the theoretical knowledge needed to generate, implement, reinvent, and diffuse new products. 

This course will focus on delivering theoretical knowledge, experiential understanding, and practical skills of how firms and entrepreneurs develop a market for new products. We will thus take students through the market development process in four phases:

1) Ideation and Development: developing new ideas and learning to prioritize and choose between them

2) Implementation: strategic market planning for implementing the new idea in a given setting, by identifying possible drivers and barriers to the new idea

3) Prototyping: developing, reinventing and prototyping the idea by formulating a strategic plan for testing the new idea while taking feedback from the market into consideration

4) Diffusion: diffusing the idea by creating traction in a target market (go-to-market).

In that process, students will engage with theories and practices related to innovation, marketing, entrepreneurship, product development, and business model development. Students will learn how to generate, implement, reinvent, and diffuse new solutions. Working in small teams throughout the course, students will learn how to create and analyse feedback that can be used to create a fit between product and market. Students will address these problems both theoretically and practically through design driven innovation (Verganti) and effectuation theory (Sarasvathy). The course introduces students to the market-oriented side of business (i.e. which products and solutions to bring to market, and how, addressing questions related to pricing, channeling, communicating, etc.). The course is thus designed to build a transition to the more process-oriented course on Market-Informed Decisions.