MSc Entrepreneurship & Innovation Curriculum
The programme consists of 10 taught modules, assessed through a blend of written examinations and continuous coursework. Taught modules run across two terms: Michaelmas (September–December) and Hilary (January–April). The final Trinity term (April–August) is dedicated to your Business Development, Dissertation or Company Project.
| Module | ECTS |
|---|---|
| Business Model Innovation | 5 |
| Digital Entrepreneurship & Scaling | 10 |
| Design Thinking & Agile Development | 5 |
| Entrepreneurial Mindset & Well-Being | 5 |
| New Venture Creation | 10 |
| Strategic Entrepreneurship | 5 |
| Financing Entrepreneurship | 5 |
| International Entrepreneurship | 5 |
| Social & Sustainable Entrepreneurship | 5 |
| Corporate Innovation | 5 |
| Dissertation | 30 |
Taught modules normally take place across Michaelmas and Hilary terms, with the final Trinity term dedicated to the dissertation or group consultancy project.
|
|
September-December Michaelmas Term |
January-April Hilary Term |
May-August Trinity Term |
| Core |
|
||
| Electives | |||
| Supporting Activities |
|
||
Note: Modules offered each academic year are subject to change. The modules listed above and below are the modules and timetable for 2025/26.
Note: Modules offered each academic year are subject to change. The modules listed above and below are the modules and timetable for 2026/27.
Module Descriptions
Business Model Innovation (5 ECTS)
Turn an entrepreneurial opportunity into a business model that creates value for customers and captures sustainable returns. Learn how to identify unmet needs, design compelling value propositions and develop business models that outperform existing alternatives. Through intensive teamwork, customer engagement, prototyping and pitching, you will treat each business model choice as a hypothesis to be tested with real evidence.
How this fits your MSc journey: Integrate opportunity identification, customer insight, value proposition design, business modelling and investor communication in one practical entrepreneurial process.
Learning outcomes:
- Understand venture development: Critically discuss key theories of business creation,growth and innovation.
- Use business models strategically: Explain how a business model brings together the core elements of a new venture.
- Identifyinnovation opportunities: Use industry, market and customer insight to uncover possibilities for business model innovation.
- Design and test value propositions: Develop solutions and assess their relevance with potential customers.
- Pitch an innovative model: Present and defend an evidence-based business model to a panel of experts.
Digital Entrepreneurship & Scaling (10 ECTs)
Create and scale ventures in a rapidly evolving digital economy. Explore how generative and agentic AI, digital platforms, no-code tools, cloud computing and data-driven market intelligence reshape opportunity discovery, business models and growth. Through stakeholder research, prototyping and testing, you will learn to use technology as an enabler of entrepreneurial judgement and design evidence-based scaling strategies.
How this fits your MSc journey: Develop the digital fluency, adaptability and practical venture-building capabilities needed for founding, scaling, investing, advising or innovating within organisations.
Learning outcomes:
- Understand digital entrepreneurship: Evaluate how digital ventures differ from traditional businesses in opportunity sensing and value creation.
- Develop digital opportunities: Use AI, platforms, no-codetools and cloud technologies to investigate and shape venture ideas.
- Design scaling strategies: Assess infrastructure, demand-side growth,resourcefulness and rapid decisions under uncertainty.
- Build ventures systematically: Combine theory, stakeholder evidence, testing and iterative prototyping in new venture creation.
- Anticipate emerging opportunities: Evaluate technology trends, responsible AI-enabled value creation and the need for strategic adaptation.
Design Thinking & Agile Development (5 ECTS)
Turn uncertain customer problems into tested, tangible solutions. Combine Design Thinking's human-centred approach with Agile Development's adaptive cycles to empathise with users, define challenges, generate ideas and rapidly prototype. Using industry tools and generative AI features, you will co-create, test and refine solutions in response to real customer feedback and changing market conditions.
How this fits your MSc journey: Build empathy, experimentation and uncertainty tolerance while learning to treat prototypes and iterations as evidence rather than fixed plans.
Learning outcomes:
- Compare innovation frameworks: Critically analyse leading Design Thinking and Agile Development approaches.
- Solve customer problems: Apply human-centred and agile methods to real business challenges.
- Build and test prototypes: Develop solutions iteratively using customer feedback and user testing.
- Use digital tools effectively: Apply contemporary software and generative AI to support co-creation, prototyping and learning.
- Reflect on venture application: Evaluate how these methods contribute to different contexts of new venture creation.
Entrepreneurial Mindset and Well-being (5 ECTS)
This entrepreneurship course explores the key formulas for business and personal success, focussing on performance mindset and well-being. An entrepreneurial mindset identifies opportunities where others see risk, generates solutions to everyday challenges, and is resourceful, adaptable, and resilient under complex and uncertain conditions. Well-being is not only a vital part of everyone’s life but it is also a crucial entrepreneurial skill that enhances personal performance and fuels business development. Entrepreneurial well-being is a multidimensional concept that encompasses a variety of human experiences and contexts (e.g. work-life integration, meaning and purpose, optimism and positive affect, self-regulation, metacognition, decision-making, leadership, influence and positive engagement). The aim of this module is to provide students with an understanding of the objective and subjective aspects of mindsets that lead to entrepreneurial success and sustainable performance. It examines the risks of allowing short-term decisions to override what’s best for our long-term performance and well-being, ultimately acting against the entrepreneur’s own best interest. It is different from other business courses because the subject is one’s own development in relation to life as an entrepreneur. It treats the Self as the primary instrument and resource of entrepreneurship. This module will help students gain insight and understanding of scientific ideas that underscore performance, appreciate practical implications, and learn to apply skills and tools in their own lives, personally and in organisational settings.
New Venture Creation (10 ECTS)
This module consists of workshops on key entrepreneurship topics not covered in detail by core or elective modules. Each workshop will be delivered by experienced entrepreneurs, consultants, and international professors and will place specific emphasis on real business dynamics. Departing from and building on the topics discussed through the workshops, students will be asked to work in groups in class and after class.
Strategic Entrepreneurship (5 ECTS)
Combine entrepreneurial opportunity seeking with strategic advantage building to support enterprise growth. Learn how to analyse internal and external environments, craft effective strategies and translate them into action. By applying strategic management models to entrepreneurial ventures and smaller firms, you will build the judgement needed to understand, challenge and participate in strategic decisions.
How this fits your MSc journey: Connect entrepreneurial action with disciplined strategic analysis and understand how wider business functions contribute to sustainable growth.
Learning outcomes:
- Understand strategic management: Explain the role and language of strategy in modern organisations and entrepreneurial ventures.
- Evaluate strategic frameworks: Critically assess the strengths and limitations of different approaches to strategy.
- Apply strategy to ventures: Use relevant models toanalyse entrepreneurial businesses and small firms.
- Integrate business perspectives: Bring learning from other management disciplines into coherent strategic decisions.
- Respond to wider contexts: Assess how sustainability, society, economics and policy influence entrepreneurial strategy.
Financing Entrepreneurship (5 ECTS)
Make informed financial decisions across the life of an entrepreneurial venture. Explore venture valuation, investment analysis, funding strategies, financial modelling and risk management through cases, applied analysis and industry insight. Learn how to forecast performance, compare financing options and align financial choices with a venture's stage, strategy and long-term sustainability.
How this fits your MSc journey: Add the financial perspective needed to evaluate opportunities, engage investors and support the responsible growth of entrepreneurial ventures.
Learning outcomes:
- Value early-stage ventures: Apply appropriate methods and assess investment opportunities using financial and market evidence.
- Manage financial risk: Identifyuncertainties and design responses to market, technology and venture-specific risks.
- Develop funding strategies: Compare angel investment, venture capital, grants and other sources across different growth stages.
- Build financial models: Forecast cash flow, assess performance and use scenario analysis to support decisions.
- Make strategic financial choices: Evaluate trade-offs and align financing decisions with business goals and long-term sustainability.
International Entrepreneurship (5 ECTS)
Explore how entrepreneurial firms identify and pursue opportunities across national borders. Examine the distinctive challenges facing born-global companies, international new ventures, SMEs and digitally enabled businesses as they compete in interconnected markets. Through theory, contemporary cases and collaborative analysis, you will assess international opportunities, entry strategies, networks and institutional support.
How this fits your MSc journey: Develop the global perspective needed to understand how young firms create and sustain competitive advantage across diverse markets.
Learning outcomes:
- Evaluate international entrepreneurship: Critically assess the theories behind cross-border venture development and internationalisation.
- Identifyglobal opportunities: Analyse how entrepreneurial firms recognise and exploit opportunities in international markets.
- Select entry strategies: Compare the options available to ventures operating across different national and institutional contexts.
- Leverage networks and support: Assess how relationships and institutional programmes enable international growth.
- Analyse international ventures: Work independently and collaboratively to evaluate contemporary global business cases.
Social & Sustainable Entrepreneurship (5 ECTS)
Use entrepreneurial thinking to address pressing social and environmental challenges. Explore the theories, practices and competing perspectives that shape social entrepreneurship and innovation internationally. Through research, cases, practitioner insight and applied project work, you will examine how mission-led organisations create impact across nonprofit, public and private sectors while navigating complex ethical and organisational tensions.
How this fits your MSc journey: Reapply core entrepreneurship and management principles to ventures whose primary purpose is creating meaningful social or environmental value.
Learning outcomes:
- Understand core concepts: Evaluate theories of social and sustainable entrepreneurship and for-purposeorganising.
- Lead for impact: Assess howorganisations can innovate and adapt in complex, contested fields without relying on heroic narratives.
- Navigate social innovation ecosystems: Examine nonprofit fields, public and private-sector relationships, and sources of social finance.
- Measure social impact: Select metrics and tools that can inform and improve social-change efforts.
- Apply ethical judgement: Analysethe assumptions, tensions and paradoxes found in social and sustainable entrepreneurship.
- Communicate a compelling case: Strengthen collaboration,presentation and pitching skills through applied assignments.
Corporate Innovation (5 ECTS)
This module focusses on the strategies and dynamics that underpin innovation development in scaleup companies. Scale-up companies are defined as startups that have expanded their business in the first five years of operations and have added at least ten employees. This module blends a theoretical and practical approach, introducing relevant theories on innovation development and growth in startups, and focussing on practical learning. The course is divided into two blocks: the first focusses on key theoretical contributions in corporate innovation and strategies for startup and scaleup growth; the second will concentrate on experiential learning through the analysis of real cases of scaleup companies.
Dissertation or Capstone Project (30 ECTS)
Bring your MSc learning together through a substantial independent project focused on a real academic, social or economic concern. Depending on your chosen route, you may investigate an entrepreneurship research question, address a company challenge or develop an early-stage venture. With guidance from a supervisor, you will evaluate evidence, make and defend methodological choices, analyse findings and reflect critically on your development as an entrepreneurial practitioner.
How this fits your MSc journey: Demonstrate your ability to move from mindset and capability to practice and impact through sustained, responsible and self-directed work.
Learning outcomes:
- Define a focused project: Frame a relevant question or challenge and explain what will be studied, how, why and for whom.
- Engage critically with evidence: Review academic theory, practitioner publications, industry reports and other relevant sources.
- Collect and analyse data: Use appropriate primary or secondary evidence within a coherent and rigorous analytical framework.
- Manage independent work: Plan and execute a complex project with autonomy, organisation and sustained motivation.
- Produce a professional report: Communicate the project and its conclusions to the required academic and professional standards.
- Reflect on entrepreneurial learning: Evaluate your decisions, development and contribution as a responsible entrepreneurial actor.