Entrepreneurship and Innovation for a Sustainable World – (M.Sc.)

The main objective of the MSc Entrepreneurship & Innovation for a Sustainable World is to educate participants in order for them to become business creators and business developers.

The value proposition of the MSc E&I is to offer one of the most advanced curricula for innovative new businesses in the perspective of a sustainable world, which means a strong focus on cleantech industries and services.

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 organized 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.

* 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 recognized 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 the annual sales turnover, number of employees, and profit. What characterizes 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 factors of success.

* 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 in detail the customer expectations and to propose a solution which is no longer a single product or service, but a solution designed to satisfy the 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 on eco development
ISMA 360° methodology on marketing of innovation
Strong links with the Sophia Antipolis cluster and its entrepreneurs
The support of the school incubator for participants with an entrepreneurial project

Career opportunities

* Entrepreneur
* Incubator advisor, investor
* Marketing and sales in innovative start-ups
* Development of new activities in existing companies
* Business developer
* 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)