Marketing of Innovations Lecture

The course provides insights into advanced marketing theories, concepts and techniques for the marketing of innovations. Students will learn about the special challenges associated with planning, developing, pricing, communicating and selling of new products and services.

After developing an understanding about strategic marketing issues, students will learn how companies can analyse customer needs and how they can translate these needs into appropriate new products and services. Finally, the module presents key issues related to the pricing of innovations, sales management and communication.

Students will be introduced to understanding the potential of up-to-date approaches in marketing such as big data analysis and artificial intelligence. Current trends such as sustainability and digital services will be discussed.

Learning Outcomes:

Based on the acquired knowledge students will be able to...

• Design and to evaluate decisions regarding marketing and innovation strategies.
• Analyse markets by applying market and technology portfolios.
• Conduct forecasts and develop compelling scenarios as a basis for strategic planning.
• Translate customer needs into concepts, prototypes and marketable offers and successfully apply advanced methods for customer-oriented product and service development.
• Use adequate methods to foster efficient diffusion of innovative products and services.
• Choose suitable pricing strategies and communication activities for innovations.
• Make strategic sales decisions for products and services (i.e. selection of sales channels)
• Apply methods of sales force management (i.e. customer value analysis)

Contents:

1. Introduction - Innovation and Service Marketing (importance of innovative, objectives and examples of innovation marketing, characteristics of services, challenges of service marketing)
2. Methods and Approaches of Strategic Marketing Planning - Patterns of Industrial Development
3. Strategic Foresight and Scenario Analysis - Objectives and challenges of strategic foresight, Scenario Analysis, Delphi Method
4. User Innovations - Role of users in the Innovation Process, User Communities, User Innovation Toolkits, Lead User Analysis
5. Customer-oriented Product and Service Engineering - Conjoint Analysis, Kano, QFD, Morphological Analysis, Blueprinting
6. Pricing - Basics of Pricing, value-based pricing, pricing models, willingness-to-pay
7. Sales Management - Basics of Sales Management, Assessing Customer Value, Planning Customer Visits
8. Communications - Diffusion of Innovations, Communication Objectives, Communication Instruments

PBL Marketing of Innovations

In two longer problem-based learning sessions (ca. 5 hours), students will have the opportunity to deep dive into selected marketing topics. The idea of the PBL sessions is to give the opportunity to practically apply the gathered marketing knowledge. Expert feedback will be given by industry guests and the lecturer. Students have the opportunity to try out different solution paths and can reflect their approaches across the work groups.

Students need to prepare for these sessions (e.g. readings). After the sessions, students hand in a post-assignment in which they sum-up the results and learnings from the session.

Learning Outcomes:

Students will learn how to approach and solve typical marketing challenges on their own.

The first PBL will cover the topic of scenario planning. Students will create a scenario-based forecast with an industry partner on a real business case. On the basis of the information provided in the case, the students will develop different future scenarios and derive strategic marketing conclusions on how to react to these possible futures.

Learnings in short:

• Creating of scenarios
• Presenting scenarios
• Making strategic recommendations based on scenarios
• Developing new business opportunities from scenarios

The second PBL will use a computer-based marketing simulation. Students will learn how to manage different customer segments and make decisions about the 4Ps in marketing: Price, Product, Place and Promotion. Students will learn how different decisions affect the reaction of customers and competition in a simulated market. In this PBL, all topcis addressed in the module are relevant.

Learnings in short:

• Learn how to develop and execute a marketing strategy in a high-technology B2B market.
• Develop a better understanding of market segmentation and how to serve the needs of different customer segments.
• Manage customer relationships more effectively.
• Understanding how pricing decision influence demand and competitive behaviour.

Content:

This PBL course involves two afternoon sessions of about 5 hours.

The PBL sessions involve interactive work in teams which is coached by industry experts and lecturers. After short introduction presentations the students will go over into the team work phase. During this time students have the opportunity to ask individual questions to the experts.

After the first team work phase a short review and selected presentations will be held within the whole class to reflect on the first work steps and give additional advice.

The students will be prompted to use the knowledge gathered in the lecture of this module and will be invited to

1. Conduct a scenario analysis for an innovative product category and
2. Engage in decision making within a market simulation game.