Innovation, Management and Policy (IMP)

Is a world-leading centre of excellence in the study of science, technology and innovation policy and management. Its research, teaching and engagement activities build on many years of expertise, based upon a guiding principle of excellence, both in terms of academic rigour and societal relevance.

The Institute focuses on the following four key themes:

Innovation Management and Competitiveness

The significance of innovation as a source of competitiveness and as a driver of industrial dynamics is widely recognised. However, innovation itself is ever-changing.

Emerging Technology, Dynamics and Governance

Its work around Responsible Research and Innovation combines with its work around the analysis of emerging technologies and their role in business strategies.

Science, Technology and Innovation, Policy & Organisations

Public policy in science, technology and innovation can reduce market and system failures, shape markets and stimulate knowledge creation and innovation.

System Transitions and Societal Challenges

Climate change, energy security, transport and resource efficiency, food safety and environmentally friendly production have all become key areas of innovation studies.

The Sustainable Consumption Institute is comprised of academics from Alliance Manchester Business School and the Schools of Social Science and Environment, Education and Development at the University of Manchester.

The SCI’s research agenda explores how consumption and production systems can be ‘reconfigured’ in order to transition towards less-resource intensive ways of life. 

The Institute has established a distinctive programme of social scientific research with the following key characteristics:

• A focus on consumption. Placing consumption in the foreground of research allows us to focus on understanding human needs, values, practices and habits.
• Socio-technical system innovation. Treating production and consumption as systems focuses attention on the relationships between everyday practices, technology, markets, industries, infrastructure, policy and regulation.
• Politics for a sustainable society. How sustainability discourses are framed, how they relate to everyday practices, and how a wide range of political actors interact across production and consumption systems.
• Advancing the evidence base. By developing novel and multiple methodological techniques the SCI seeks to make a distinctive contribution to the framing and content of the policy evidence base.

Our academics make a distinctive contribution to this intellectual agenda, especially through the study of innovation, sustainability and system transition.

SCI research also makes a significant contribution to our teaching activity. Two new courses have recently been introduced – a Global MBA on Sustainable Business and a University College Course on Innovation for a Sustainable Society – while the SCI also provides content for the MSc Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship, and for the recently launched MOOC entitled ‘Managing Responsibly’.

Sustainable Consumption Institute >>