Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Master of Arts (M. A.)

After completing this module, students will be able to recognise the importance of innovations for the profitability and survival of companies and organisations. You will also be enabled to create operational structures, organise the stages of the innovation process and creatively implement innovative concepts within the framework of developing and optimising products and processes.

The aim of this module is to present customer experiences as an interdisciplinary task against the backdrop of the growing social focus on adventures. Strategy, conceptualisation and implementation of staging experiences / service design present both organisational and empathetic, behavioural challenges. This module examines the problems related to the dimensions of customer experiences from an economic and sociological perspective, explains the basic principles of how individuals experience service processes and events psychologically and analyses the stages and methods involved in developing and staging experiences and service provision.

The basic aim of this module is to familiarise you in brief with the key terms, scientific methods and instruments of applied market research and project management. This forms the conceptual and instrumental basis for both working on relatively complex projects and conducting competent market research projects and activities in business practice. In particular, during the course of this module you will be enabled to check the feasibility and marketability of your own business and marketing ideas using robust methodical investigative approaches and relevant management instruments from the field of market research (e.g. SPSS) and project management (e.g. MS Project) and to critically analyse the results with regard to the corresponding strategic and operative management decisions required. This module will also enable you to progress from addressing complex tasks and project proposals based on your “gut feeling” to systematically analysing and planning them using cutting-edge organisational techniques. You will then be capable of planning and organising an extensive project and coordinating the management of the project team efficiently and with a focus on staff.

The aim of this module is to familiarise you with the fundamental business and legal issues and tasks involved in setting up a business and independent entrepreneurship. Besides a fundamental analytical and functional framework of reference, by means of engaging with a business plan we will equip you with a conceptual and analytical tool for developing and scrutinising your own business ideas. This module will enable you to analyse your own business ideas set against the fundamental challenges involved in founding a business and the essential core tasks inherent in independent entrepreneurship and to reflect upon these with regard to the corresponding strategic and operative business decisions required.

The basic aim of this module is to familiarise students with the essential values, aspects and forms of expert human management and to enable them to critically reflect upon their own patterns of action and behaviour in interpersonal management situations. After attending the classes in this module, students should know and understand the basic theoretical and methodical principles of conflict management and mediation, have assimilated the basic theoretical and methodical principles of conflict management in both intra- and intercultural contexts and have experienced for themselves in simulations how to practically apply the basic, instrumental leadership skills in case studies and exercises.
This module is designed to help students improve their social leadership and communication skills and to develop a greater understanding of the cognitive and social processes involved in intra- and inter-organisational collaboration. The classes in this module enable students to experience and question their social leadership skills and to systematically develop their managerial actions based on their basic theoretical and methodical knowledge and in particular situations.

The aim of this module is to familiarise you with innovative and state-of-the-art online and offline marketing and sales concepts in business practice and to discuss them in light of both current business science theory and the developing internet economy. This should lay the basis for developing your own competent marketing and sales concepts and initiatives and also give you the opportunity to critically reflect upon the quality and form of the substance of companies’ conventional and internet-based marketing and sales initiatives media set against cross-sector best-practice approaches and real-life cases.

We will use case studies and/or set tasks from business practice (e.g. project developments in tourism, developing experience-focused service provisions) to practise structuring, analysing and implementing complex, often diffuse real-life problems. In addition, you will be asked to develop your own business idea as part of this module and draw up a business plan for it, which you will then present to a panel of experts.

The aim of this module is to teach students about external and internal accounting or expand their existing knowledge.

Students will be placed in a position to understand and apply controlling concepts. An understanding of the need for controlling will also be developed. We will discuss and work on the controlling skills and structures required for advising senior managers,

also delivering a basic understanding of the elements contained in annual accounts. Students will be enabled to scrutinise and critically reflect upon financial reports based on specific examples.

The basic aim of this module is to look beyond the factual business issues and tasks involved in founding a business and independent entrepreneurship that were addressed in module 4 towards the long-term strategic challenges and legal parameters related to running a business. The topics of strategic thinking and action together with generating strategies to achieve above-average, sustainable business successes that create value form the essence of this module. In addition, the specific legal issues attached to running a company will also be analysed and discussed.

The aim of this module is to raise your awareness of ethical-normative questions and issues with regard to running and working and with people in a company/organisation. You should perceive ethical and responsible action within the realm of corporate social responsibility concepts as a corporate philosophy that helps companies, other organisations and institutions to voluntarily integrate social and environmental concerns into their corporate activity and the interrelationships with their stakeholders. To achieve this, you will learn about various management philosophies and corporate cultures whose value conceptions and mindsets regulate their action to achieve business success (profit, sustenance, adding value) in a morally responsible way. We will set these insights against the fundamental tasks involved in human resource management and discuss and critically reflect upon them with regard to value-based leadership of staff in their aims, opportunities and limitations. The focus will be placed on the leader’s role throughout.

Succeeding in producing your master’s thesis demonstrates that you possess the skills to tackle a problem related to the subject of “innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership” using scientific methods within a given timeframe and to present your work both in writing and orally.