MA Innovation Management

The standard entry requirements for this course are as follows:

• An honours degree at upper second-class (2:1) or above in a relevant field: business studies; management; social sciences; humanities; physical sciences; marketing; arts and design
• Or an equivalent EU/international qualification
• And normally at least one year of relevant professional experience.

AP(E)L – Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning

Exceptionally applicants who do not meet these course entry requirements may still be considered. The course team will consider each application that demonstrates additional strengths and alternative evidence. This might, for example, be demonstrated by:

• Related academic or work experience
• The quality of the personal statement
• A strong academic or other professional reference
• Or a combination of these factors.

Each application will be considered on its own merit but cannot guarantee an offer in each case.

For fees and funding information, please see website 

Innovation has been identified as crucial to business success, Cox Report. MA Innovation Management will generate career opportunities within:

• Innovation research
• Strategy development
• Business development
• Brand management
• Innovation research
• Policy and strategy development
• Innovation research
• Strategy development
• Business development
• Brand management

Unit 1: Exploring Innovation (40 credits)

Unit 1 equips you with the foundational knowledge and skills to approach and navigate complex briefs. The unit begins with a rapid, critical review of contrasting views innovation, innovation management, design and design thinking, drawing upon academia and practice, challenging you to engage with conventional and more radical perspectives including foresight and speculative futures. Speakers from cutting-edge fields such as bio-design and global sustainable fashion help explore how innovation management can be reframed as a creative practice in its own right. The second part of the unit is a service innovation project, that develops your critical understanding of service innovation and design, and introduces collaborative approaches to problem-solving and innovation. 

Unit 2: Collaborative Practices for Common Good (20 credits)   

Unit 2 provides an opportunity to collaborate with students from other postgraduate courses across CSM to work on a challenge-based project. The unit requires you to engage with how your specialist knowledges and skillsets can be applied in support of a specific societal or environmental challenge as part of an interdisciplinary collaborative team, harnessing creative thinking, critical judgement and creative output. It is an opportunity to be fully situated within the art college environment, both digital and physical, and to work alongside students from creative arts and design courses in imagining and implementing innovative responses to an assigned challenge.

Unit 3: Imagining Futures and Situating Innovation (60 Credits)   

Unit 3 offers you the opportunity to respond to a live client-facing brief and it supports you to determine your personal direction for the final stages of the course. You will be required to work in groups to discover, articulate and showcase promising novel (business and impact) opportunities and solutions that have the potential to advance desirable future visions, co-imagined with industry clients. This unit involves practical and professional workshops including project management, facilitation, pitching and ethics. It also includes preparation for your placement or field study later in the unit, including applying for a placement, writing a research question, ethnographic methods, and qualitative and quantitative research methods.  You will be asked choose between fieldwork supervised internally at CSM or securing a work based placement through which to explore innovation situated in a professional organisation. You will have the opportunity to develop your individual interests and concerns as an innovation professional.  Teaching includes basic ethnographic and other research skills that you will need to grasp before carrying out your research activities. It challenges you to identify a core theoretical and practical concern that can be subsequently researched in a real-world context, through placement or field study, to deepen your learning and insight, and lays the groundwork for your dissertation.  

Unit 4: Applying and Articulating Innovation (60 credits)    

The course culminates with the application and articulation of innovation, based on your synthesis of learning from earlier units. This takes forms including an academic dissertation and a public-facing journal article. You will also work with your cohort to organise, manage and deliver an outward facing series of end-of-course events, designed to engage diverse audiences. These may combine contributions produced by individuals and small teams with collectively organised symposia, festivals or conferences (that bring together professionals and other attendees from the extended MA Innovation Management community and beyond), alongside digital media outputs for identified and international audiences.  

All course units integrate personal and professional development, enabling students to explore the professional world and manage them career development. Students are offered opportunities to engage with industry professionals at different points along their journey, to support their professional development and emerging creative or entrepreneurial projects.

Important note concerning academic progression through your course:

If you are required to retake a unit you will need to cease further study on the course until you have passed the unit concerned. Once you have successfully passed this unit, you will be able to proceed onto the next unit. Retaking a unit might require you to take time out of study, which could affect other things such as student loans or the visa status for international students.