Data Science and Innovation for Impact

Objectives

In the current context of accelerated change, the development of new products and services is fundamental to sustaining a company¿s long-term competitive advantage. Also, firms and their managers have to rapidly adapt to the evolution of their business environments in order to survive. Yet, the most successful firms go beyond an adaptive behavior and are able to innovate and to stimulate corporate entrepreneurship within their firm. The course aims at understanding the multiple dimensions and perspectives on innovation (including incremental and radical, disruptive, revolutionary, open, user, collaborative, design-driven, service, process and product, etc), as well as the different contexts where the innovations are developed, e.g. by firms as an instrument of competition, by non-profits organizations as an instrument for the improvement of their services or for reducing their costs, by users with the objective of being used. At the same time, the speed in which technology is advancing increases day by day. Artificial intelligence, robotics, and big data have made an impact across all industries. As technology evolves, companies are exploring new ways to improve their offerings and revolutionize their industry. In all these different contexts innovations are shaped by economic factors affecting the way they are conceived, developed, implemented or accepted by their markets and its users. 

This course enables students to understand the fundamental principles and main concepts of managing innovation, including some fundamental management frameworks, as well as the different ways of developing and managing an innovative culture, with a focus on the healthcare context. It will also provide students with a set of tools that will allow them to analyze innovations and contribute to their managerial decision processes from this economic perspective.