Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Personal Development Journey: Global Leadership Skills

Module I: INSPIRE

Start-up Bootcamp

The objective of this course is learning about your own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the fuzzy front-end of starting up a business as well as learning to use several tools to identify good business ideas and develop them into interesting business opportunities. You will (hopefully) learn to see opportunities where others only see chaos.

Creative Thinking

In this course, participants will develop an understanding of how to boost individual and collective creativity and get an appreciation of why so many companies look at creativity as an important strategic capability, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Technologies of Tomorrow

Part I: The technologies of tomorrow we’re confronted with every day often sound like a buzzword bingo: blockchain, artificial intelligence, deep learning, Internet of Things, etc. The aim of this module is to provide a clear understanding of what they are and how they can have an impact on your business.

Part II: This part of the module will be built around technology sourcing and intellectual property management. Not purely from the protection point of view, but combined with open source discussion, collaboration agreements and creativity techniques based on patents. We will also look at how the technologies of tomorrow are entering the intellectual property business (the rise of blockchain, NFT’s, AI, …).

Module II: BUILD

Advanced Finance for Innovation

This course provides students with the minimum required expertise to plan and model a start-up from a financial perspective and to understand how to raise funds from professional investors. Students learn business valuation techniques, investment criteria, financial modelling, and the main and most important concepts of corporate finance. The main goal is to help students to effectively present a business idea to professional investors and to understand a fund-raising process.

Entrepreneurial Strategy

The course is structured to provide a deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing start-up and corporate innovators. It draws on a rapidly emerging body of research in entrepreneurial strategy combined with entrepreneurship research conducted by AMS that moves beyond the “one size fits all” approaches to start-ups (e.g. lean start-up) and instead focuses on the key choices that founders face as they start and develop their business.

Corporate Entrepreneurship

This course is designed to provide students with both fundamental and practical knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship. This obtained knowledge is important in real-world business settings in two ways. First, for (aspiring) entrepreneurs as it addresses the challenge of and provides how to remain entrepreneurial once ventures mature. Second, those that seek careers in established organizations or incumbents gain key insights into why and how corporate entrepreneurship can improve firm performance.

Business Design Thinking

This course makes innovators aware of the many assumptions on which core strategic choices along the way are based upon and offers tools to validate these assumptions. Validated assumptions offer the opportunity to make better decisions when developing solutions. In addition, our innovation sprint in collaboration with Poli.Design in Milan is part of this course.

Module III: GROW

Digital Marketing

This course acknowledges all forms of marketing - be it offline (e.g. billboard advertising, newspaper ads) or online (e.g. keywords advertising, social commerce). Yet, the course sets a strong focus on digital marketing because (i) marketing channels are intertwined in Omni channel strategies, (ii) digital marketing is offering strong potential for growth and (iii) traditional channels are enhanced through digital technology (e.g. a personalized billboard ad).

Entrepreneurial Selling

This course brings (future) entrepreneurs the latest best practice on how to sell their ideas and influence customer behavior. In this course, we go “inside” the psychology of persuasion to understand how and why it works. We focus on the techniques that entrepreneurs use to design compelling messages and explore why some messages are more persuasive than others.

Growth Strategy

The course focuses on how to scale your idea. It gives a deeper insight into the growth obstacles that companies face when they are scaling their ideas. The course supports students in designing successful growth strategies to overcome these growth challenges. Finally, it includes an international trip to an inspiring entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Master Project

You will be working on an in-company project (a venture building project) or on your own start-up for eight months. Whatever you choose, you will directly put theory into practice: Throughout these eight months you will be investigating and challenging the potential of business ideas by transforming them in real business cases, including a market research, a product-market fit business model, a sound financial plan and ambitious go-to market strategy.

Note: Curriculum is subject to change, depending on the evolution of the Covid pandemic.

In Poli Design (Consorzio del Politecnico di Milano), the world’s best school in Design Thinking, you will spend a week learning techniques that will be immediately implemented in practice. During three weeks you will work full-time on a design-related exercise for an international company, the so-called “innovation sprint”.

At the end of the program, the group will be split up in three groups. Each group will be visiting an upcoming highly innovative ecosystem in the world that could be possible places to scale-up. Every year the students visit different locations. In 2019 the students went to Lisbon, Zürich, and Stockholm. In 2020 trips to Barcelona, New York and Tel Aviv were planned. Due to Covid 19, we went virtual.

The topic of our virtual journey to Tel Aviv and New York? Accelerating business in uncertain times.

Watch two of our video sessions.

Part I: Tel Aviv

Part II: New York

All master’s programs offer 1 full week of elective courses

Electives are all about immersing yourself into

… the impact of new technologies

• Digital Transformation
• Organizing the digital future

… the globalized world

• Geopolitical Challenges
• International Strategy

… leading and managing others, enabling human impact

• Human Capital

… how to solve complex problems

• Global Industry Crisis/Challenges – (e.g. healthcare management under covid, aviation crisis to a greener future)

… think about new ways to create & capture value

• Designing business models for future growth
• Business Model Innovation

By adding one of these general and hot management courses, students can give their AMS journey a personal touch!

Your personal development is a core element in the journey you will undertake during your year at Antwerp Management School.

At AMS, we look beyond the mere transfer of technical knowledge. As our mission statement explicitly mentions, we also want to stimulate your personal development. With the Global Leadership Skills track, we challenge and coach you to become more aware of who you are, how you cooperate with others, and what kind of career you want to pursue. We do this by building upon the three mission pillars of Antwerp Management School:

• Self Awareness: leads to stronger cooperation with others.
• Global Perspective: leads to a developed global mindset, allowing you to find better solutions to problems and complex issues.
• Societal Consciousness: leads to sustainability in essential economic processes, a fundamental value in business.

Throughout this journey, we will focus on these three levels of learning by working with a mixture of exercises, self-analysis instruments, moments of reflection, individual follow-up, collective sessions and peer coaching. We will offer you relevant frameworks to support you in understanding your strengths and needs, and defining your areas for growth.

Global Leadership Skills development is more than a ‘nice to have’, it is a basic prerequisite for career success and recruiters will be assessing this when you apply for a job. Today’s employers are looking for an impressive set of soft skills when selecting young graduates. These include: self-awareness, the ability to work collaboratively with others, leadership skills, the capacity to adapt to new situations and to develop new skills, openness to and respect for different perspectives, multicultural awareness, and long-term and system thinking, to name just a few. This course aims to support you in developing these skills and in finding a match between who you are and what the world of employment needs; between your career ambitions and what employers are looking for.

After attending this program:

• you have acquired state-of-the-art knowledge of, and practice with digital & disruptive business models, design thinking, innovation strategy and management, lean start-up methods and tools and marketing & finance for new entrepreneurs and innovators;
• innovation and entrepreneurship will be part of your DNA;
• you have developed the creative mindset and innovation skills of an entrepreneurial leader;
• you are able to identify future opportunities faster and to evaluate them more thoroughly so that you can make the right strategic decisions;
• you know how to turn a creative idea into a sustainable successful product or service within an existing company or your own start-up;
• you have broadened your network by meeting entrepreneurs, corporate innovators and CEOs of innovative companies during the corporate workshops, innovation and entrepreneurship labs and Master Project.