Teaching and coaching innovation and entrepreneurship An interactive workshop with Joe Tidd and John Bessant The background - the innovation frontier is constantly moving and the role of research is to explore and develop understanding of what is going on at that frontier. But at the same time we need to be able to bring the messages back and share them, building our understanding of what makes for effective innovation management in a changing world. This places emphasis on ‘teaching and coaching’– enabling learning about how to build, sustain and extend innovation management capability. And the process of trying to communicate and share these ideas inevitably raises new questions which feed back into the research agenda. The challenge - so how do we manage the innovation management teaching, coaching and training challenge? It is not simple – first of all our audiences are diverse, ranging from undergraduate students through to experienced practitioners and policy-makers. And the range of approaches available to us is equally wide – we can learn from case studies, simulations, reflective exercises, games and online interaction as well as through core conventional lectures. And the media which we can deploy offers a third dimension of variety – from traditional books and papers to audio and video and increasing real-time interaction across social networking space. The Special Interest Group - given ISPIM’s commitment to excellence in promoting understanding of innovation management it is appropriate that we focus some of our efforts on sharing and developing our understanding of innovation management teaching in its various forms. That’s the role of this SIG – to create a community of practice across which we can learn, share and develop our capabilities to teach, coach and train as well as research and to promote close interaction between the these worlds. The workshop – Joe and John have been active in this area for many years and are the authors of several textbooks (including ‘Managing innovation’ (6th edition in press), ‘Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ (3rd edition) and ‘Strategic innovation management’ (all published by Wiley)). They’ve also been building a rich resource bank (www.innovation-portal.info) which is an open platform containing over 100 case studies, extensive video and audio material, a well-stocked Innovation Toolbox and a wide selection of activities to support various kinds of teaching and coaching in the area. In the workshop they will reflect on key developments and explore with participants some of the current challenges in designing and delivering effective teaching and coaching in innovation management.