Educating innovation managers: strategic issues for business and higher education

Successful commercialization of new technology presents companies with a series of difficult and complex management challenges that require special understanding, skills, and techniques. These management challenges in turn translate into an educational challenge: how institutions of higher education can help prepare managers who can recognize technological opportunities and successfully match them with customer needs. The author raises and discusses a series of issues that face business enterprises and institutions of higher education associated with the need to develop approaches to improve engineering and technology management education. The author suggests a focus on the process of technological innovation as a means of accomplishing the necessary integration of business and engineering perspectives and concludes that improved innovation management education will require both business and institutions of higher education to recognize problems in innovation management education, to make institutional changes, and to cooperate in developing and delivering quality education programs