First year of flagship MBA course

Professor Bart Clarysse, head of the Entrepreneurship Hub

Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design is a new mandatory course for all Imperial MBAs. It first cohort reached the end of the course in July.

The first cohort of MBA students to complete the business school's flagship learning programme presented the fruits of six month's work in a round of assessments ending in July. All MBA students are now required to take the Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design course (IED), which launched this year. Each group gave a 20-minute presentation before responding to questions from academics and business coaches about their business case or feasibility verdict developed for a new technology, idea or business need.

Professor Bart Clarysse, head of the Entrepreneurship Hub at the School and IED course leader, explained the context for the new teaching programme, which blends mentoring with lecturing, online resources and monthly workshops.

"70% of the products and services we will be using in the next 10 years have not yet been invented," he said. "This programme is getting the people, skills and ideas from a range of disciplines and applying these to real world problems. It's a new and exciting model for teaching which we're hoping to further improve and refine for next year's cohort."

The programme began a year ago with a lecture series for each of the three disciplines. This provided students with a theoretical grounding before applying the techniques for themselves. Overall there were 33 project teams drawn from the three MBA programmes, each working on a unique project.

These projects came from industry partners like Cancer Research UK, BAE Systems, HP, P&G, QinetiQ The RCA and NESTA. Imperial Innovations, the College's spin-out company, several students also provided project ideas. Five of the proposals deemed to have investment potential will now enter a final business plan competition with a cash prize of £10,000 for the winning plan. This will be judged by a panel of professional investors.

The programme fits into Design London by offering Royal College of Arts and Faculty of Engineering students the opportunity to collaborate on this process, either as originators of ideas or to complement the expertise of the Business School teams.

Throughout the project, the inventors or ‘owners' of the business ideas were invited to attend the workshop sessions and to partake in the process, ensuring the team was working within realistic boundaries and to the original brief.

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