University of Commerce Luigi Bocconi

The course focuses on the new product development process as a complex inter-functional management topic, which requires strategic initiative, aligned organizational solutions and appropriate supporting methodologies. Collaborative innovation is presented in order to discuss the potentialities of the involvement of external players in the innovation process, also thanks to the opportunities offered by internet-based technologies. Despite the increasing relevance of innovation strategies and new product development, few companies seem to have mastered their ability to identify, create, and exploit opportunities for innovation on a systematic basis. Crafting and delivering a new product is not an easy and intuitive process, but the result of a set of structured and organized practices. This course explores these practices and exploits the tools and techniques that can be used to this purpose. The New Product Development and Open Innovation course is organized in two main parts. The first provides a set of integrated frameworks and tools to effectively design and manage the strategies, processes, and techniques for innovation. It provides the conceptual tools to understand the nature and characteristics of different types of innovation, as well as practical insights on how to design and manage a new product development process. The second part of the course is focused on how digital environments can help companies to open their boundaries and pursue processes of open and collaborative innovation, involving several external partners in their new product development activities. Special attention is paid to the role of users in enhancing innovation and to ad-hoc mechanisms supporting their active involvement, among which user communities, virtual knowledge brokers, and Open Source Systems.

This course seeks to understand the concepts and the techniques required to conduct marketing research and to know how to apply them in real world marketing research problems in order to make better business decisions. In this course students are introduced to different stages of the marketing research process. The course examines different types on research designs, how to collect and scrutinize data, and quantitative research methodologies and their applications to various data sets which can be used to solve real-world business problems. The contents of this course comprise theory, concepts, and frameworks relevant to marketing, and empirical methodology and their applications to real-world datasets. The topics include but are not limited to: exploratory/descriptive/causal research: research design and data collection; experimental design; sampling; A/B testing; consumer segmentation: cluster analysis; perceptual maps: factor analysis; market response modeling; field experiments; and conjoint analysis. The course recommends students be have a basic knowledge of linear regressions and t-tests as a prerequisite.

This course illustrates how Operations and Supply Chain Management can be managed to properly deal with health, social, and environmental issues and how to transform such a challenge into a source of competitive advantage. The course focuses on specific topics related to the Triple Bottom Line and to the Circular Economy paradigms, by linking sustainability concepts with the product life cycle, from its design, manufacturing, distribution, and possible end-of-life recovery options. The teaching style of this course is consistent with its learning goals and is based on case discussions, group work, real examples, and on the interactions with guest speakers from companies that are coping with these issues. During the course, topics are analyzed moving from real-life case-histories, so as to make the students aware not only of the technicalities related to sustainability in Operations and Supply Chain Management, but also of the most valuable experiences of companies and of industries that are leading the process toward a more sustainable operating system. Topics covered include: mega trends and competitiveness; synergies between profits and sustainable practices in Operations Management; design for environment; sustainability and vendor selection; sustainability and production; lean management and six-sigma; sustainable logistics, transportation, and packaging; reverse logistics and closed-loop supply chains; sustainability and performance measurement.