Integrated Innovation for Product and Business Development (Innokick)

With the Innokick Master’s, I not only learned to work with people from different educational and career backgrounds, but also contributed to practical projects with businesses that were facing a real-world issue. All the experience within the group gave us the tools we needed to put forward relevant, realistic solutions. The course also gave me an appetite for running my own business and surrounding myself with people who have the skills I don’t, in order to run successful projects.

The format of the Innokick Master’s impressed me with its combination of practice and theory, individual and group competencies and real-world experience, with businesses putting forward concrete projects for us to work on as a group during the year. What makes the Innokick Master’s stand out is the number of skill sets and people from different backgrounds you can meet during the course. The advantage of a full-time course is that you get the chance to know each other through the projects, identify everyone’s skills and create synergies based on our needs and ideas. It’s also rare to have so much time and so many skills available to work on projects during a course, which means that the concepts you develop can be properly fleshed out.

Participating in the Innokick Master’s is an excellent opportunity to bring together a team of young students from several higher-education institutions, with skills in the key disciplines required for a development project. Thanks to the multidisciplinary team, the work done by these highly motivated young people means we will be able to complete a project we’ve wanted to do for several months in record time, even though we haven’t been able to allocate internal resources to it.

Innovation is a strategic issue for the business, which allows it to gain and retain a significant competitive advantage in the face of increasingly ferocious competition. But innovation is an elaborate process that requires a methodology, a state of mind and some very particular skills.

It’s this know-how and fresh energy that we wanted to get from the students and staff involved in Innokick. The results exceeded our expectations and we were impressed by the commitment of the working group, the number of useful ideas they produced and the professionalism they showed, both in terms of project management and the quality of the deliverables.

We met our objectives in full and now we have a fascinating disruptive innovation that we will be incorporating into our portfolio of digital services.