The world we live in is highly interconnected and interdependent on tectonic disturbances in the business. Systematic innovation management proves invaluable in response to pandemics such as COVID-19, technological change or growing customer concern for the environment. Companies that can take advantage of technological innovations in such a dynamic environment can gain a competitive advantage over their competitors and improve performance and profitability.

However, building an organization that will successfully and repeatedly bring technological innovations to the market is a daunting managerial challenge. The same problem can face entrepreneurial firms (new and established) or firms that have been successful in their business so far. This course focuses on exploring the practices and processes that managers use to manage innovation effectively and how leveraging internal resources and identifying what makes a company unique can gain and maintain a competitive advantage to organizations.

During the course, we will also study the disruptive trends of technological innovations that already affect business processes or potentially already impact companies' business shortly significantly.

The objective of the course is to define and explain practical techniques and frameworks that can be used to identify opportunities for innovation in the case of disruption. In the course, assess the viability of ideas and build a competitive real-world implementation strategy. The teaching material ranges between strategic issues (what should you do?) and organizational and management issues (how to do it?). However, the focus of the course is more on examples and cases that provide a huge opportunity to integrate and apply these tools in a practical business context and achieve a better competitive position.

Knowledge, skills and competencies that students should adopt:

· Describe the critical elements of an innovative organization

· Identify the resources and processes needed to develop an innovative culture and position the company's business for growth.

· Identify forces of change, types of change and forms of change.

· Understand the advantage of the disruptions and set the future business for new growth.

· List the differences in management innovations during gradual and discontinuous changes.

· Define stages in the process of change.

· Describe which internal operations are crucial and which operations can be outsourced.

· Identify relevant business use-cases related to specific disruptive technologies and demonstrate the ability to assess these use cases

Class attendance policy is 80%

· Ex-cathedra,

· Case studies,

· Presentations and Discussions.

20%  Group project                

10%  Group presentation  

20%  Individual essay    

50%  Final exam           

Group project provides the opportunity to prepare some written document with an innovative idea of service, product, platform, or organizational form due to the seventh block lesson.

Group presentation provides the opportunity to plan, deliver, and pitch the project on the eighth block lesson.

Individual essay provides an opportunity to increase and demonstrate understanding of e-commerce theory and practice. The essay due is on the exam day and will be evaluated through peer review. A detailed explanation of the essay format will be provided during the first block session.

The final exam will be held several days after the last block session. It will cover material from class lectures and discussions as well as the textbook. It will consist of questions in multiple-choice, short answer format and short essays.