Which UK universities offer innovation management degrees? 

Management may be a ‘Cinderella issue’ in the innovation news space, eclipsed by social media, entrepreneurship and mobile technology. Nonetheless, academia is responding to growing industry demands for accredited innovation management capability

Most of the world’s coverage of innovation focuses on products, technologies and small startups, but a very significant amount of innovation is happening inside larger, more established enterprises, both at the strategic R&D level and also operationally, with the introduction of innovative practices, products and services.

Innovation in a more institutional culture often poses a quite different set of management challenges (to those which confront newer, more independent fledgling entrepreneurs) and the specific skills needed to tackle them have not been broadly recognised as constituting a specialist ‘innovation management’ discipline until comparatively recently.

For this reason, formal academic qualifications in managing innovation are starting to become more widely available at a growing number of leading academic institutions.

What I have done here is to compile a list of the UK universities offering bachelors, masters and PhD degrees in innovation management (where the qualification includes both management and innovation in the title of the degree itself).

This idea was sparked by an extraordinary book that I have just received from Keith Goffin, professor of Innovation and New Product Development at the School of Management at Cranfield.

This book is not so much an introduction to innovation management as a subject, but instead, as my initial ten minute browse has already made clear, it is more akin to an impressively detailed encyclopaedia of the myriad pertinent issues and relevant literature on the subject.

Professor Goffin  is involved in (among his other innovation management related courses and activities) Cranfield’s MBA course, and although there are no MBA courses on the list below, I hope to be able to tackle the subject of innovation management and MBAs in a future article.

I also hope to delve further into his book and offer some feedback to iij readers on some of the issues he raises in it, as well as covering his later book on identifying hidden needs, which should also be with me shortly.

The list is in no particular order and the numbering is purely for ease of reference. Although I have attempted to be reasonably comprehensive, if you know of any courses that are missing, or where the details need revising, please contact me.