Man­age­ment Ac­count­ing for Design and In­nov­a­tion

Course content

The purpose of the course “Management Accounting for Design and Innovation ” is to address skills to students with interest in business involving design and innovation activities. In particular, the course addresses how management accounting can be a technology of management to support innovation process, design activities, and new venture formation.

In this course, the aim is to integrate issues like the specific planning and organization of innovative companies, calculation practices and performance measures with design activities and processes to help understand how companies can cope with strategic decision making on design and innovation issues. The practical and operational implementation of these strategic, design decisions in financial dimensions; budgeting and the choice of transfer price practices in firms are concrete examples of some of the management issues discussed in the course.

The students are intended to acquire specific knowledge on how companies use costing and accounting information for decision-making and control throughout the innovation process. The accounting information is used, for example, to allocate costs to products and projects, to inform and calculate prices, to create incentives for the development team, to estimate profit and to assess common resources used by distinct departments. At the same time, the companies have to deal with organizational matters like who has the decision rights regarding making optimal decisions on behalf of the company.

For the survival of these companies, it is crucial that principals (shareholders) and employees are able to connect the design side of the company with the costing and management accounting side, the processes of product design/development as well as the production and price formation processes.