Elective courses
1. Applied Foresight
- Foresight and Strategic Planning
- Key approaches (methods for scanning environments, identifying trends and drivers of change with weak signals and wild cards, developing future scenarios and visions and making long, medium and short term strategic plans for identifying priorities and actions)
- Innovative ways of decision-making and STI policy formulation; STI strategy- and priority-setting; cooperation and networking with stakeholders
- Foresight and Strategic Planning processes for public and private organizations
2. Bridging Worlds: An Introduction to Science Diplomacy
- Core concepts and theoretical underpinnings of science diplomacy
- The influence of strategies/instruments the states employ on national and international scientific collaborations and policy-making
- The role of international institutions for science diplomacy and its specific instruments and potentials
- International scientific collaboration and its navigation through science diplomacy efforts/instruments
- Future directions in which science diplomacy might evolve (including identifying emerging tools and strategies for effective diplomacy)
3. Business Model Innovation in Energy Engineering
- Technical developments in different technologies, their advantages and disadvantages and prospective future developments in the field and dominant cases of technology comparison.
- Theoretical aspects and practical implications of business model innovation (suitability of business models vs. their potential success).
4. Competitive Intelligence
- The role of market insight (intelligence, foresight and analytics) for innovation
- Organizational (including structure, processes and cultural) requirements for competitive intelligence
5. Corporate Foresight
- Corporate foresight tools, models and methods
- Priority setting for corporations and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), its outcomes and challenges
- Role and place of corporate foresight in companies, components of successful corporate foresight
- Scenario development and its Interpretation
- Corporate Foresight and integrated road mapping for decision-making
6. Data Business (new course scheduled for 2025-2026 academic year)
- Data storage techniques
- Mitigation of risks connected with data collection, transmission, storage and processing
- Opportunities for new business models based on data utilization
7. Economics of Innovation. Advanced
- Contemporary multiactor perspective on innovation
- Core macroeconomic dimensions of innovation and its link with economic development
- Key insights of the microeconomics of innovation
8. Ecosystems of Innovation and Entrepreneurship
- Partnership governance and management
- Partner search strategies of companies
9. Finance of Innovation
- Financing innovation in companies
- Risks of investment in innovation
- Methods for assessing investment opportunities of innovation projects
- Venture capital
10. Geography of Innovation: What Are Its Patterns and How Policies Shape Them
- Proximity, regional innovation system and smart specialization
- Evolution of regional specialisations. Related and unrelated diversification
- Urban innovations: how to measure and support
- Clusters and cluster policy
- Creative industries: spaces, regional specializa-tion, entrepreneurial activity
11. Managing Creativity
- Creative economy - concepts and its measuring
- Policies supporting creative industries
- Creative leadership, idea generation and creativity techniques
- Creativity and corporate culture
- Concepts of creativity in psychology
12. Responsible Business and Sustainable Development
- Business ethics, responsible business and sustainable development: definitions, central concepts and discourses
- Stakeholder capitalism, sustainable business models and responsible business norms
- Globalization and sustainable development
- Social entrepreneurship and future of sustainability
13. The Digital Economist: Mastering Python for Smarter Analysis (new course scheduled for 2025-2026 academic year)
- Basic statistics, Python and economic applications
- Python programming basic operations
- Data structures and control flow in economic models
- NumPy and matrix operations in financial analytics
- Data analysis with Pandas for economic datasets