IT & Strategic Innovation Masters (MSc)

Choose Kingston's IT and Strategic Innovation MSc

The success of an organisation can rest on both an understanding of IT and how to use innovation strategically to enable new growth and competitive advantage. This course aims to provide an understanding of the characteristics of high-tech innovation combined with the leadership and management values necessary for entrepreneurship (new venture creation) or for successfully creating and managing strategic innovation both from within an organisation as well as from outside, eg as an IT consultant.

Key features

• This course is accredited by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
• You can tailor the course to suit your own career development needs, industry background or organisation's requirements.
• The project/dissertation gives you the chance to study an area of interest in greater depth and gain valuable research skills. It often takes the form of a business plan relevant to your career, and provides an excellent selling point when looking for a job or promotion. If you are an overseas student, we will help you to carry out a project either based in your home country or that will be of specific relevance when you return home.

What will you study?

You will study the types and characteristics of innovation, as well as the major barriers to the spread of innovation. This will enable you to recognise and welcome the increased rate of change and instability in the business and technology fields. You will gain an understanding of the role of IT and information systems in encouraging, capturing and managing innovation in an organisation and how this relates to constructing better value chains by using knowledge management, data mining, data governance, decision making and business intelligence. There is input from especially the "Big Data" research group. You will also be encouraged to acquire Agile qualifications as an integral part of your ability to organise, manage and risk-manage large and small IT projects.

Assessment

Coursework and/or exams.

Many postgraduate courses at Kingston University allow students to do a 12-month work placement as part of their course. The responsibility for finding the work placement is with the student; we cannot guarantee the work placement, just the opportunity to undertake it. As the work placement is an assessed part of the course, it is covered by a student's tier 4 visa.

Invoicing on the placement courses is split into two stages. The standard course fee is payable in year 1 with the placement fee invoiced in year 2. Therefore, students starting in September 2017 would therefore be charged the placement fee of £1,070 in September 2018. Students commencing the course in September 2018 will be invoiced the placement fee in 2019 (provisionally £1,230).

This amount will only be charged to your account after you find a placement and are enrolled on the module. You will not be charged this fee if you do not manage to secure a work placement.

Find out more about the postgraduate work placement scheme.

The full MSc course consists of an induction programme, four taught modules, and project dissertation. Please note that this is an indicative list of modules and is not intended as a definitive list.

Teaching on this course usually takes place in 2 separate specific week blocks (Monday to Friday 9am – 5pm). For further details please contact secpgstudentoffice@kingston.ac.uk.

Modules

• eBusiness Strategy and Implementation

• eBusiness Strategy and Implementation

  This core module introduces IS strategies and their importance to business organisations in the current competitive global economic environment. As IS affect the structure and operations of markets and organisations an introduction to integrated enterprise systems and their role in shaping the structure of current competitive organisations focusing on standards, technical delivery architectures, implementation and related issues.
  

  On successful completion of the module, you will be able to:

  • Analyse the current competitive environment using appropriate techniques and identify opportunities to provide competitive advantage by implementing information systems.
  • Propose and evaluate IS solutions that could add value to organisations.
  • Identify change management issues and plan appropriate steps in order to implement strategic IS solutions.
  • Evaluate the opportunities that technology provides for the creation and delivery of integrated IS.
  • Critically analyse the technical features of integrated IS along with their associated professionalism issues.

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• IT and Entrepreneurship

• IT and Entrepreneurship

  Entrepreneurship builds new and better value chains by using innovation. Using IT can provide such innovation in the push for more efficient building models and this module illustrates the various factors needed to provide a platform for the entrepreneur.

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• Modelling Enterprise Architectures

• Modelling Enterprise Architectures

  The module focuses on various components of modelling an Enterprise Architecture. It deals with modelling the business and the underlying information and software system to support the business. It follows the object-oriented paradigm for the development lifecycle, and utilises UML as the modelling language. Indicative contents include aspects of enterprise architectures, business analysis, business modelling, business process reengineering, requirements engineering, object oriented concepts and principles and UML.

  On successful completion of the module, you will be able to:

  • Critically evaluate and utilise a specific enterprise architecture framework.
  • Apply the principles of requirements engineering to capture, priorities, model and document functional and non-functional requirements, whilst appropriately collaborating with relevant stakeholders.
  • Perform business analysis and business process reengineering to develop business models.
  • Critically evaluate and utilise a software development lifecycle.
  • Apply object oriented development concepts, tools and techniques utilising the UML modelling language.
  • Critically evaluate and utilise resaerch methods, tools and techniques, taking into account legal, professional and ethical issues in the development of information and software systems.

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• Data Management and Governance

• Data Management and Governance

  This core module looks at ways organisations manage, store and secure data. Different approaches and methods will be explored to model data requirements into entity-relationship diagrams, logical diagrams and normalisation.

  On successful completion of the module, you will be able to:

  • Explain the fundamental concepts of data modelling and database design and implementation.
  • Translate process models and systems requirement models into a database design using class diagrams and entity relationship diagrams and write SQL statements for the definition, access and control of data.
  • Evaluate different approaches to the storage and management of unstructured data such as images and multimedia data.
  • Critically asses information governance within the context of different organisations.
  • Describe and deploy data encryption techniques suitable for encrypting, signing and protecting data and highlight their correct usages and understand the principles and techniques of steganography, and how these can be used.
  • Evaluate the security risks presented by computer networks and understand the role of vulnerability assessment tools and other security-related software and be able to put them to use and design and deploy a firewall to secure a network.

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• Project Dissertation

• Project Dissertation

  This module constitutes the major individual piece of work of the masters programme where you will carry out a project involving independent critical research, design and implementation (where applicable).

  On successful completion of the module, you will be able to:

  • Select, justify and use effectively the research methods and techniques appropriate for particular cases in order to carry out a literature search and an independent work of research.
  • Critically identify the need to position your research in the wider academic or business context and structure the dissertation format to agreed conventions.
  • Plan, manage and critically evaluate the project using the techniques and tools needed in order to bring it in successfully on time and within resourcing limits.
  • Identify and critically analyse real-world problems or knowledge gaps to which academic concepts and methods can be realistically applied to improve or resolve the problem situation.
  • Apply skills to show an ability to engage in academic and professional communication with others in their field through report and presentation.
  • Present critical awareness in applying appropriate legal, social or ethical obligations and when required, respond to the financial and other constraints of a corresponding business environment.

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You will have the opportunity to study a foreign language, free of charge, during your time at the University as part of the Kingston Language Scheme. Options currently include: Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.