Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Successful innovation should be a part of your business strategy, where you can create a culture of innovation and make a way for creative thinking. Innovation is a facilitator of entrepreneurship, innovative ideas are what will make a startup competitive.

The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group (I&E Group) is the largest of four research groups at Imperial College Business School and is globally leading in its field. It is an interdisciplinary team of academics, led by Professor David Gann, linking Imperial College Business School with the faculties of Engineering, Natural Sciences and Medicine within Imperial College London, as well with numerous external academic institutions and industrial leaders.

At the heart of the Group is the Innovation Studies Centre (ISC) funded for ten years by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), to conduct research on the innovation process, from knowledge creation to commercialization. The ISC was established in 2003 and encompasses the core research themes of the Group – Open and Distributed Innovation, Business Model Innovation, Systems, Services and Design, and Diffusion of Innovation.

The Centre collaborates with internationally leading academic institutions in the UK and overseas and works with world class firms such as GSK, IBM, Arup, Laing O’Rourke, CSC and BP, disseminating its findings widely.
The I&E Group has two additional research themes, Strategic Entrepreneurship and Inclusive Innovation, not funded by the central EPSRC grant.

Types of innovation:

Pen and Distributed Innovation
Led by Professor Ammon Salter. The purpose of this theme is to develop new knowledge and inform practice about open and distributed innovation. Developing and commercializing an innovation requires the coordination and integration of knowledge from many different sources and networks. Increasingly, innovators rely on external knowledge to complement and enrich their own expertise.

Business Model Innovation
Led by Dr Markus Perkmann, the research explores various questions regarding such business model innovation. What enables organizations to devise new business models and what are the sources, and consequences, of business model innovation? Current work focuses specifically on the low-carbon energy sector, which provides an ideal setting to investigate the ways organizations‘ experiment with new ways of deploying energy technologies, as well as generating and consuming energy.

Systems, Services and Design
Led by Dr Andrew Davies, this Theme examines the design, integration and operation of complex systems, particularly in the infrastructure industries (e.g. energy, water, roads and urban environments). Increasingly, organizations‘ are providing systems and services as ‘smart’ Led by Professor Gerry George. The content of this theme is in development.