Programme taught in English at the Sophia Antipolis campus.
This MSc is a full-time course taught over a twelve-month period. There are eight months of taught courses, followed by four to six months for the dissertation and internship.
Career opportunities
→ Entrepreneur
→ Incubator advisor, investor
→ Marketing and sales in innovative start-ups
→ Development of new activities in existing companies
→ Business developer
→ Executive consultant and audit
Partner companies
Local incubators, Sophia Business Angels, Pôle Artemis-CARMA, Pôle Capénergies
Partnership with the Master Innovation and Technological Entrepreneurship (MNN) of the Tech de Monterey (Mexico)
Programme outline
→ Eco-system of Innovation
Innovation is like an iceberg and a tropical forest. It is like an iceberg because what you see above the surface is just a small part of the content. It is like a tropical forest because, like a biological ecosystem, a variety of elements is necessary for life to develop. The course is organised to discover what is under the surface of innovation and the multiplicity of actors necessary to develop rich innovative environments.
→ Entrepreneurial Finance
Entrepreneurial finance has two main characteristics if compared with traditional corporate finance. Because it deals with a new activity, there are neither financial flows nor assets to get funded and the entrepreneur has to raise significant amounts of money to finance the activity. The second characteristic of entrepreneurial finance is that it is risky. For those two reasons funding is mainly in capital and the players are not traditional banks but Business Angels, Venture Capitalists and the financial markets. Therefore the main expertise of finance experts is capital raising and valuation of the project.
→ Advanced Strategy
Business strategy is a predictor of firms’ innovation behaviour. Too often, entrepreneurs do not pay enough attention to the critical issue of aligning innovation practices with strategic posture to generate value innovation. Strategy-innovation fit must be thought of as a continuous adaptive cycle. The course provides students with in-depth understanding of strategy theories from an innovation perspective. It bridges the gap between theory and the practice of strategic management through the critical analysis of research papers and case studies. The course emphasises controversy, thus anchoring student critical judgment and decision-making capabilities in robust knowledge bases.
→ Strategic Marketing of Innovation
The marketing of innovation is different from traditional marketing because the product is often new and the market does not exist so far. Therefore most of the failures of innovative products or services are due to marketing reasons. The course will present the specificities of marketing of innovation, and the students will discover a unique marketing method, ISMA 360°, developed at SKEMA, which is widely recognised as one of the most advanced in the field.
→ New Venture and Business Plan
This course will take the student from innovative idea creation to early start-up activities and acquisition of the first clients for a new business. Central to this process is the iterative creation and fine tuning of a business plan, development of understanding the uses of the business plan for management of key activities and for attracting outside investors.
→ Eco-design
Eco-design is a process helping companies develop competitive and innovative low environmental impact products. The main principle consists of including environmental criteria in the early stages of the design process of products, throughout its development, taking into account aspects of its entire life cycle. This course aims at giving useful and main knowledge on eco-design: principles, methodologies, tools, impacts on the innovation process, external and internal information flow and cost flow.
→ Strategies of High-growth Businesses
Some businesses outperform others in terms of growth of in annual sales turnover, number of employees, and profit. What characterises these organisations? What do they do better than their competitors? This course aims at analysing the propelling ingredients commonly found among these companies, which contribute to constantly improve the performance of a specific business model. Students will learn to identify these success factors.
→ Technology and Innovation Management
The technology-management interface will be explored from two perspectives: (1) the management of the technological environment (2) the impact of technology and innovation on business processes and functional areas of the company, whatever the technological intensity of the company.
→ Solutions-based Selling
A key challenge of innovators is to define a valuable selling policy to attract customers and to establish the company on its market. Another key challenge is to understand customer expectations in detail and to propose a solution which is no longer a single product or service, but a solution designed to satisfy customer need. This course deals with those issues, giving the participants knowledge and skills to define a sales policy, including negotiation skills.
Why choose this programme
The positioning of the programme dedicated to prepare future entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to take advantage of the new business opportunities offered by a sustainable world.
ISMA 360° methodology on marketing of innovation. A methodology that helps change the rules of the game and open new competitive spaces.
Strong links with the Sophia Antipolis science park, its clusters and its entrepreneurs.
The support of SKEMA incubator for participants with an entrepreneurial project.
In-company projects and assignments
→ Open innovation at Norsk Hydro
→ How does the development of innovative activities in China impact the R&D organisation of companies from developed countries? The case of China-based foreign R&D centres.
→ Students can draw up the business plan for their own project instead of the thesis.
Programme directors
Sophia: Philippe Chereau
Suzhou: Michel Bernasconi