Innovation Mapping for Industry

This module focuses on your personal innovation talent and skill development exclusively in the context of your individual industrial innovation project. During this and the following trimester, you will create a comprehensive Innovation Mapping for your industrial project, for which you shall research in much detail all relevant current and future market possibilities, technology and science possibilities, and implementation possibilities (such as cost,
manufacturing, supply and value chains, laws and regulations, business models, etc.).

When finished, your Innovation Mapping should systematically quantify the ‘bounded phase’ across all these dimensions, defining your industrial project's comprehensive innovation opportunity space and pointing towards the most likely directions in which the continuous innovation process should proceed. Innovation Mapping is very different from creating current snapshots, because you will actually learn deeply in multiple dimensions, abstract the entire domain into fundamental realities, and quantify future feasibilities that can lead to potentially valid innovation paths.

Building on the Iterative Innovation Process fundamentals from the previous module, effective further development of your innovation talent and skills now requires you to be engaged hands-on in the full real-world complexity of your industrial project. Your development and your project progress will be guided and assessed individually and continuously throughout this module by innovation experts, first twice per week and then once per week, in a similar fashion as PhD students are guided by their thesis advisors.

During extensive mentoring sessions in small student groups (each with his or her own industrial project), your innovation expert shares your learning deeply, and supports you intellectually and personally as you cycle through anticipation, hypotheses, finding suitable data, research, understanding, abstraction and parameterisation, repeatedly across the multiple dimensions, until the system comes together. Including the mentoring sessions, you will need to spend approximately 28 hours per week on this module to achieve the necessary learning dynamics. At the end of the module, you will record a capstone presentation marking the halfway point of the overall Innovation Mapping for your industrial project.