Course 2024-2025 a.y.

Despite the growing importance of innovation strategies and new product development, few companies have mastered the systematic identification, creation, and exploitation of innovation opportunities. Developing and delivering a new product is not an easy or intuitive process; it results from a set of structured and organized practices. This course aims to explore these practices and utilize the tools and techniques necessary for this purpose. The New Product Development and Open Innovation course is divided into two main parts.

- The first part offers integrated frameworks and tools to effectively design and manage innovation strategies, processes, and techniques. It provides conceptual tools to understand the nature and characteristics of various types of innovation and practical insights on designing and managing a new product (and service) development process.

- The second part focuses on how digital environments can help companies open their boundaries and engage in open and collaborative innovation, involving multiple external partners in their new product development activities. Special attention is given to the role of users in enhancing innovation and the specific mechanisms that support their active involvement, such as user communities, and the new opportunities offered by the digital technologies, such as Virtual Knowledge Brokers, Platform, and Open Source Systems.

• Understand new sources of value creation in a systematic manner through innovation, managing the growth in new markets and in existing businesses.
• Understand how to organize a new product (and service) development process and the different roles of the functions involved.
• Analyse the opportunities arising from the collaboration with the external players (customer, suppliers, supply network) at the different stages of the process (idea generation, technology development and introduction on the market).

• Understand and apply new product development techniques, both on customer-driven innovation or technology pushed innovation.
• Formulate a plan to improve the innovation process of a selected company thanks to external sources of innovation, distributed and collaborative innovation.
• Define which are the criteria to be considered in order to select innovative supplier in co-creation projects.
• Exploit the potentialities of new digital technologies to increase the productivity of the innovation process.

• Practical Exercises
• Collaborative Works / Assignments
• Interaction/Gamification

• Classes will be organized to stimulate active participation and clarify any doubt about the topics discussed. 
• The exercises allows students to immediately apply the theory in a real case, in order to improve products or services based on the voice of (target) customers. A project based exercise will be organized on ad hoc excel file and it requires a short group presentation in class.
• Case studies and examples provide real case applications of the topics discusses in class, illustrated by the instructor or discussed directly by the students (instructions are provided in class).
• The final group project provides an opportunity to apply course concepts to a selected company and to perform an in-depth analysis of new product development and open innovation issues. The group project is developed in the second part of the course, partially in class in order to be tutored by the instructor, and it will be presented in class the last day of the course by all groups.
• Each project presentation done by students will receive also feedback from classmates through a form distributed in advance. This wants to improve the soft skills of giving (and receiving) constructive feedbacks to (and from) peers, in a protected environment.  

The final grade is composed by:

1. Individual written examination (70% of the grade).
   • The individual written examination is closed-books and it consists of multiple choice questions and some short essay questions. Multiple choices questions assess the knowledge of the key concepts explained during the course. Short essay questions evaluate the capability to summarize theorethical models an propose actions to a described specific situation.
2. Group work project (30% of the grade).
   • The group work project evaluate the capability to apply and clearly communicate with the appropriate language the concepts learnt during the course to a specific selected case study.

The final grade is 100% based on an individual written examination. The individual written examination is closed-books and it consists of multiple choice questions and some short essay questions.  Multiple choices questions  assess the knowledge of the key concepts explained during the course. Short essay questions evaluate the capability to summarize theorethical models an propose actions to a described specific situation.

Selected articles for each session will be communicated at the begininning of the course and they will made available through course reserve.